Cobra

A Cobra is not a soldier who carries a weapon. A Cobra is the weapon — lasers seated in the finger joints, servomotors strung along the bones, a nanocomputer wired into reflexes quicker than conscious thought. Built in secret to bleed an alien occupier off the human colony worlds, the Cobras win their war and then run headlong into the harder problem: the surgery does not reverse. You cannot muster out a man whose skeleton is a gun. So a grateful, uneasy government ships its heroes to the frontier — to Aventine and Caelian, worlds where the wildlife hunts back — and lets the wilderness spend what peace has no room for. Timothy Zahn's saga runs to nine novels across three trilogies, tracking the Moreau family down the generations. The original books — Cobra, Cobra Strike, Cobra Bargain — carry Jonny Moreau from the war to the statehouse, then hand the fight to the first woman ever cut for the implants. Cobra War (Cobra Alpha, Cobra Guardian, Cobra Gamble) and Cobra Rebellion (Cobra Slave, Cobra Outlaw, Cobra Traitor) push his heirs into the long cold standoff with the avian, mercantile Trofts and the estranged human world of Qasama, with omnibus volumes gathering the run. This is military science fiction with its eye fixed on the aftermath. The tactics are exact and the hardware ingenious, but the true subject is quieter and colder: what a society owes the killers it manufactures and then cannot unmake — the veteran as ordnance that never quite gets stood down. Begin at the beginning, with Cobra; the trilogies are written to be read in the order they were published.