Second Wave is Book 2 of The Amargosa Trilogy. Book 1, The Children of Amargosa, will be rereleased by Clayborn Press in May with the final installment, Storming Amargosa, to be released next year. Second Wave is currently available for 99 cents on Kindle.
Lucius Kray first appeared in Gimme Shelter as a frustrated rural constable on Amargosa. A veteran of the Polygamy Wars, he misses his days as a war hero and is convinced something else bad is about to happen. Enter Marcus Leitman, whom we’ve already met. Marcus sells GMOs, which are the life blood of humanity’s expansion into the stars. Only those companies we fear today for their GMO experiments? They’ve been around for so long that they know what does and does not work. And the best way to keep their markets is to self-regulate. That’s why they don’t like startups. And Leitman works for a startup.
To get his way, he plays on Kray’s ego and stokes his paranoia, providing him with weapons to start his unauthorized citizens’ militia. During the reading of this novella, one person commented they thought Kray was the good guy. After all, he kind of had a point that was proven the night the Gelt came.
But by The Children of Amargosa, it’s clear he loves leading the militia more than he cares about liberating Amargosa. As both Davra and JT discover separately, Kray is having civilians who don’t join him killed to take their supplies. He’s no longer a would-be savior. He’s a warlord.
And it’s against this threat that Suicide sets out to reach the fallen Ban Ki-moon. The resistance cannot afford for Kray to reach the fallen starship first. If the Compact sees Kray as the legitimate leader of Amargosa while under occupation, it could spell disaster for when the planet is finally liberated. He is largely in the background for most of Second Wave, but in the end, it’s clear he is almost as big a threat as the Gelt themselves. Worst of all, he’s an enemy that’s human.