They were the best. Colonel Alois Hammer: He welded five thousand individual killers into a weapon more deadly than any other in the human universe. Luke Broglie: His brilliant mind could have succeeded in any business; but war was the business he chose. Tess Kuykendall: She knew what her job was, but she also knew what was survivable. Slick Des Grieux: War was his life, and that made him almost too dangerous to live. The collision between different styles of being The Best meant a bloodbath, even by the grim standard of Hammer's Slammers