Note! What Price Honour? was originally the first part of Merkiaari Wars, but when a prequel was published in 2012, it became the second part.
Humanity's last encounter with aliens saw sixteen point two billion
people killed in a war with the Merkiaari that had spanned decades. Only by the grace of God and the use of Nanotechnology were they defeated.
The result of that Nanotech? Vipers, a regiment of super soldiers tasked with protecting the Alliance and annihilating the Merki. It was a job
they performed with distinction, a job they completed almost two
centuries ago. a job that had cost them their humanity. Thurston is an
unimportant border world with a problem, a Marine type problem. Not the
sort of place Gunnery Sergeant Gina Fuentez expected to find one of the
fabled Viper cyborgs, but that's just what she discovers when a simple
mission to extract an operative from a terrorist camp leads to a
firefight and two of her squad dead. With friends dying around her and a world coming apart at the seams, Gina must decide if the Marine Corps
is really her home, or just a stopping place to where she really
belongs.