the humans through the annihilation of those who have learned the secrets of gunpowder and industrialization. The Merki are aided by a group of Union sailors who fled the Tugar war on the ship which brought the 35th Maine and 44th New York to this world. In exchange for their survival, the humans help the Merki develop firearms and other technology. The Merki attack is more successful than the Tugar one and forces the humans to abandon the Russian territory in a scorched earth campaign, but eventually, they win with their use of trains. Several years later, the expanding human alliance faces a new threat in the form of the Bantag. The Bantag are a horde from even further south. They are led by a member of their race who arrived from another world that has a late 20th-century level of technology. This alien, a soldier in his own world, assumes a messianic role among the Bantag and modernizes their society to equal, and even surpass that of the humans. He is familiar with atomic reactors as well as centerfire rifles. The Bantag scavenge engines from decaying cities abandoned by their people millennia ago and use them to power airplanes. The reader learns that the people of the Bantag had once been a technologically advanced star-faring race, visiting many different planets and seeding teleportation devices across them. The Bantag homeworld collapsed in a nuclear war but the teleportation devices remained sporadically active and ended up transporting various humans to the planet Vallenia (the location of the novel), though Vallenia was not the homeworld of the Tugar/Merki/Bantag race. Using their advanced technology, the Bantag attacked the Union (introducing steampunk tanks and 20th-century mortars). However, the humans developed their own flying machines (mainly blimps and early Zeppelins) and formed a counterattack. The final book in the series, Down to the Sea, takes place a generation after the arrival of the 35th Maine. With the children of the original regiment members reaching adulthood, they face a new threat from across the southern sea, the Kazars, aliens who have an early 20th-century level of technology and who also have a selectively bred slave race of human assassins, called the Shiv. Titles Rally Cry (1990) Union Forever (1991) Terrible Swift Sword (1992) Fateful Lightning (1992) Battle Hymn (1997) Never Sound Retreat (1998) A Band of Brothers (1999) Men of War (1999) Down to the Sea