I've made several attempts at a logline for this novel before I posted this one, but they all ended up too long, so I didn't post them.
In those attempts, I kept trying to include the marine's reason for coming to this place for shore leave. When I wrote this version, I forgot to mention it. Another character, a cadet, whom the marine loves was last seen there before he vanished. The marine brings two of his best friends, who are also marines, to search for the cadet, and they're granted shore leave to do so.
The setting for this novel is a small town on the capital world of the Trident?Coalition. The protagonist and his friends are citizens of the Coalition and serve in the Coalition Marine Corps, while the Cadet is training to become an officer in the Coalition Space Fleet.
The town is near a famous landmark where there's an annual regatta, which is just a few days after they arrive.
I'm not sure if "insurgents"?is the right word for the enemies that they encounter. They're from the planet Humbaba, a world that is often aggressive and tries to invade its neighboring systems. The protagonist?and his friends have encountered Humbabans before, as they're trying to get their hands on a WMD that a rogue officer in the Coalition Military Intelligence developed and tested. (in previous NaNoWriMo novels, I haven't published any of them, yet.) The Protagonist?and his friends were able to stop the rogue officer, and there's a new guy in charge, but he's only marginally better than the previous one.
In this novel, the Humbabans appear to be on the planet, to participate in the race, but that's just a cover to find the inventor, who created the original blueprints for the WMD and is hiding in the wilderness where they hold the race. The protag discovers, after having found the cadet, that the Humbabans plan to use the race to find and abduct the inventor and make him create the WMD again, for them. So the marines and the cadet enters the race to stop them.
The local authorities?are the Military Intelligence guys, who aren't very helpful, so that's why the protag and his friends have to do it themselves.
Thanks for wishing me luck.