Palladium Wars Books in Order

The Palladium Wars books take place in the Gaia system, a small cluster of six inhabited worlds still reeling from a recent interplanetary conflict. The industrial power Gretia tried to remake the balance of power by force and lost, leaving its cities occupied and its people branded as aggressors. A formal peace exists, but it is fragile. Trade must resume, prisoners of war need to be processed, and everyone remembers exactly who fired the first shots.

Instead of one central hero, the series follows several people whose lives were bent by the war. Aden is a former Gretian Blackguard officer who spent years in a POW camp and now lives under an assumed identity, working as a linguist on a small merchant ship. Idina Chaudhary is a color sergeant from the victorious side, stationed with occupation troops on Gretia and walking a daily line between keeping the peace and provoking more resentment.

Commander Dunstan Park serves in the Rhodian navy, watching new fleets and weapons take shape as old enemies quietly rearm. Solveig, Aden’s sister, is trying to rebuild their family’s resource conglomerate under close Allied supervision, while also working out what her powerful father did during the war. In Aftershocks these threads introduce a system that looks calm on the surface but is riddled with anger, economic pain, and people ready to exploit both.

In Ballistic, smuggling runs, targeted bombings, and political street fights make it clear that someone is knitting scattered cells into a coordinated movement. Gretian nationalists and sympathizers off world start using new names and symbols, and attacks in space echo violence on the ground. Citadel raises the stakes with a nuclear strike that almost shatters an entire world’s defenses and pushes Dunstan onto the bridge of an experimental cruiser while Idina and Aden confront terror cells on Gretia itself.

Descent sends Aden back to his home planet as an undercover operative tasked with infiltrating Odin’s Wolves, the insurgent network fanning the uprising. At the same time, Idina leads Palladian commandos against hidden arsenals, Dunstan hunts the rebels’ ships in deep space, and Solveig digs through corporate records to find out who is paying for all of it. Every success against the insurgency carries a cost, and every mistake threatens to turn a cold peace back into full scale war.

Across the series, Kloos keeps the action grounded in details like overtaxed occupation patrols, boardroom maneuvering, and the tiny choices that decide whether a skirmish stays small or becomes a casus belli. It is less about dazzling technology than about how ordinary people live with the fallout when empires overreach.