Tveskoeg's success with his Aux unit results in a new assignment, with the orders coming directly from the Emperor and his top military commander, Gen. Jaxx. The mission is to assist the United Free in a mission on a colony named Hekati. However, only the young and inexperienced Col. Vijay, assigned to actually lead the mission, knows the details of what they are to accomplish and why.

As they arrive at a desert planet they believe is Hekati, an explosion aboard the ship requires a forced landing, and they must fight for their survival, while also trying, without disobeying direct orders, to keep Col. Vijay from getting them all killed. After they barely manage to survive their ordeal, they learn that the harrowing episode was merely a test to see whether they were ready for their real mission, which turns out to be different from what they were told, on the real Hekati, which turns out to be a run-down ringworld filled with a motley assortment of ruthless and deadly outcasts from across the galaxy.

The body count builds exponentially as Tveskoeg and the Aux slowly fight their way through Hekati. Along the way, they learn the true nature of their mission—and the massive levels of death and destruction that will be required to successfully complete it.

Testosterone-dripping, hard-core violence

There seems to be a surge in military science fiction of all sorts in recent years. Most consists of relatively mild and entertaining military space opera written by authors such as Elizabeth Moon and Mike Resnick, and the lightweight infantry SF novels of Tanya Huff. But some recent military SF novels have pushed the extremes of hard-core violence, most notable of which were last year's novels Death's Head by David Gunn and War Machine by Andy Remic, both British authors whose novels combined the relentless energy of such contemporary Brits as Richard Morgan and Neal Asher while brimming with nonstop, testosterone-dripping, hard-core violence owing more to video games such as Halo and Warhammer than any literary progenitors.

The aptly named Death's Head: Maximum Offense is a direct sequel to last year's novel, which told of Tveskoeg's rapid and violent rise from humble beginnings to OctoV's infantry and finally to becoming an officer in the Death's Head special forces. The entire novel is told from Tveskoeg's viewpoint, much of it in first person, which creates a number of limitations in the narrative. Tveskoeg is in many ways a complex character, but he's also somewhat understandably one-dimensional. Because of his limited knowledge, the reader sees relatively little of the politically and technologically complex future galactic civilization in which he lives, and the reader never really gets to know the other characters, seeing them only from his limited perspective. The novel is largely devoid of introspection and exposition. Many readers will wish that Gunn had spent more effort in adding depth to his characters and milieu instead of focusing on breakneck pacing that serves to hide the many lapses in logic in the story. But Gunn does not appear to forgo these finer literary values for lack of skill, but rather by intent. The few brief glimpses of introspection and backstory in the novel are very effective, most notable being the flashback to Tveskoeg's childhood.

Gunn also shows significant skill here in handling his fast-paced story, especially in the concluding chapters, where the stakes rapidly build while the odds of success steadily dwindle. It's a thrilling ride, to be sure. But with so much focus on a protagonist that any given reader will either love or hate, this is a novel that is bound to elicit extremely diverse responses from different types of SF readers. This is a novel upon which only extreme responses can be expected, some very positive and some very negative.