After returning to Earth from the mission on the space station at the end of Scout, Emanuel Santana disappears into the hills for years. A brief encounter with Rosa Winter in the final issue of New America revealed he met a woman and had two sons.
Scout: War Shaman is set a year later, in 2015, after the mother of his children has died, and people are starting to nose around the valley where they'd lived. So Santana and his sons, Victorio and Tahezy, leave the valley in search of a new place to live.
But the world hasn't stood still in the time Santana's spent hidden away. A steamboat trip brings him into conflict with pirates. The survivors among his old friend Doody's followers are still around, and when they realize Victorio has strange powers, their priests decide he's the prophesied child Doody mentioned before his death, the Life-Giver. Which sets off a long, and frankly annoying, pattern of them trying to abduct Victorio, or betraying Santana to keep the kid, and Truman contriving some reason why Santana doesn't blow their damn heads off and be done with it. I'm not a parent, but I'd figure the first time someone tries stealing your kid would be the last time.
(The series sometimes, like in the pages above, has narration boxes from an interview between physicians and the "marauder" Victorio, in the year 2030. Which suggests whatever notions those priests had, Victorio didn't quite live up to them, if he got captured. Maybe Truman has plans for another series that never got off the ground.)
The reason is usually a greater threat. Specifically, Rosa Winter, now titular head of what's left of the U.S. She's trying to pull the country, which has fallen into more of a wide mass of city-states, back together, under her rule. Her methods are of the classic style: You can surrender, or you can be killed. Your choice. The "priests" think she's the darkness the Life-Bringer must combat, which is bad enough. And Santana can't seem to avoid crossing paths with her, to the extent that, when she's overthrown by an old acquaintance of theirs, back from the dead, they work together.
(Truman, for reasons I don't know, uses a lot of the same design elements for "Redwire" as he did for GrimJack, minus the beret.)
Until the inevitable betrayal, of course. Rosa regains the upper hand, but decides Santana's too dangerous to let live, even if he'd agree to work with her. But from her perspective, she let Santana go AWOL originally, and when he reappeared, he flipped the world on its head, killing the President and setting off a wild chain of events that Rosa often found herself caught up in. There were wars, cities were nuked, lots of people died.
And then, at a certain point, Santana just disappeared into the hills again. To start a family, while Rosa was the one left behind, carving off pieces of her soul trying to protect her country. It's all his doing, but she's the one with the scars, the mechanical hands and mechanical eye. She helps him save his sons, but when she wants to save her adopted daughter, Santana knocks her unconscious and takes her hostage, leaving the young woman to be locked up. (Truman never tells us what happened to her, but I assume it's nothing good, given how the book ends.)
Santana would no doubt argue that he wasn't given a choice in that initial quest. The gods pushed it on him against his will, and everything after was just him trying to deal with the consequences. But Rosa would have no reason to think that was anything more than evidence he's nuts and she should have stopped him from leaving in the first place. Every time they work together, Rosa loses something.
But she made her choices. She could have withdrawn to the shadows after she was presumed dead in the plane crash. Let Bill Loder run the country into the ground, but no. She had to take revenge. And then she just couldn't leave a power vacuum, so she had to assume control. And then she couldn't allow any elements to survive as persistent threats, so she crushed them. Rosa had a sense of responsibility, or perhaps duty is the better word. It brought her first into contact with power, and later power herself, but she didn't use that power responsibly, if that makes sense.
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