The Buchanan Campaign (1995) 375 pages by Rick Shelley.

The Federation drops soldiers onto the colony world of Buchanan, and Doug Weintraub quickly sends a message for help off to the Commonwealth, and sneaks off into the wilderness. Buchanan is sparsely populated, only 37,000 people and two cities. The rest is uninhabited.

In this universe space travel is done by jumping into Q-space and coming out a long ways away in regular space. Because Doug was in a hurry, he had to send his message off with no regard for safety, and had the rocket jump directly into Q-space from the planet's surface. This allows Commonwealth admiral Stasys Truscott to experiment with Q-space travel.

The story follows Doug, Truscott and his aide Ian Shrikes, Prince William, a couple of spacehawk pilots, and Sergeant David Spencer and his I&R platoon. It's an interesting tale, and keeps the reader's attention, flows smoothly and wraps up neatly. With, of course, the possibility of a sequel, this being just the first battle between the Commonwealth and Feddies.

The thing that struck me was there was not one syllable of dialog to or from a Feddie. Buchanan is invaded, we follow Doug who hightails it off to the bushes and don't hear if they have made any announcements to the civilian population. The Commonwealth ships come they immediately go into battle with the Federation ship that's in the Buchanan system, but it gets away. They see the electronic signals of the Federation soldiers that were abandoned on the surface, but they immediately go into radio silence. There skirmishes that ensue between troops on the ground result in dead and wounded, but seemingly no prisoners -- either way. There is no background story of how the human population came to be split into Federation and Commonwealth. There is only a little bit, mostly Price William speaking, being said of what they are at all. Basically the Federation takes over planets and rules them, taking resources and conscripting soldiers, etc. The Commonwealth it made of members who freely join, etc.

It's like a very long novella, because it misses all of this background info. It's enjoyable, but it's more of a focus on the tactics of the Commonwealth Royal Marines than anything else.