Mercenary's Destiny (The Wild Geese Saga, Book 5)

A cry for help comes from a colony in the Frontier as it is swept by disease. As Kodomir responds by sending a medical team, guarded by its Wild Geese battalion, no one realizes the Black Fire epidemic is an act of terrorism. As they try to help the colony, tragedy strikes Alisti Mahmud al-Kheyntamenti, the Geese's commanding officer; he and his friend Gwielgi find themselves returning to a world of their shared past, a world of slavery that has made a deal with a devil, a devil who unleashes Black Fire across the stars. To keep him from doing worse, Kheyntamenti, struggling with grief, may have to sacrifice the Wild Geese to prevent another terrorist attack, one worse than Black Fire.

Mercenary's Destiny, the fifth Wild Geese novel by Steven M. Silver, finds the former mercenaries known as the Wild Geese, encountering love and loss, implacable righteousness and terrorism in God's name, and the true meaning of what it is to be a warrior. Mercenary's Destiny makes use of Silver's background in the military, as a historian, and a psychologist, to develop worlds of the future grounded in human experience.