Showing results by author "Jay Allan" in All Categories

The human powers have been pushed to the brink, battered, and almost destroyed. The virus they have invented and deployed, their sole possibility for victory, seems to be too little, too late. Its usage has only spurred the enemy to quicker action, to finish the war before they have to deal with its effects. But the humans do not know that the Highborn are faced on another front, by a race they know little about but have battled for two centuries.

The Confederation has fought three wars against the forces of the totalitarian Union. Three generations of its warriors have gone off to war, held the line against the larger, more powerful enemy. Now the fourth conflict is imminent, and the Confederation's navy is on alert, positioned behind the frontier, waiting for the attack it knows is coming.

The Confederation and its allies have won their first victory, retaking their capital from the forces of the Hegemony. But the enemy is not beaten, far from it, and they are back, with an unstoppable weapon, a vast superbattleship, a deadly hybrid of imperial and Hegemony technology, called the Colossus. The great ship is enormously powerful, nearly unstoppable, and in its armored depths it hides a secret, another Hegemony weapon, one that will change the dynamic of the entire war.

War. The word spreads throughout the Confederation...the long-expected Union invasion has come. The enemy is strong, their fleets larger and more powerful than intelligence reports had predicted. They have broken through the forward defenses, sent the Confederation's proud fleets into an ignominious retreat.

Night is falling. The unstoppable Hegemony invasion has reached the very heart of the Confederation. Battle after desperate battle has been fought, and each time, the Confeds have been pushed back, columns of battered and blasted ship retreating from system to system. Now, they prepare to grimly defend the capital world of Megara, the very center of the Confederation. Tyler Barron prepares for what could be his final battle, a final desperate defense, one last chance to stem the tide of Hegemony conquest and subjugation.

A battle is coming, the greatest the Rim has seen in 10,000, a fight for freedom, for the future, for the very survival of all humanity holds dear. Tyler Barron and his comrades are ready for their greatest test, but even as they prepare to hold the line at Fortress Striker, to turn back the Highborn’s imminent attack, the enemy have opened another front, one far to the rear.

Captain Tyler Barron and the crew of Dauntless are finally enjoying the rest they've earned while their aging battleship gets the repairs and refit it desperately needs. But their respite will be short-lived. In the Badlands, deep in the haunted vastness of pre-Cataclysmic space, a new discovery threatens to upset the balance of power. Orbiting a world in a distant system is an ancient battleship, vastly larger and enormously more advanced than anything possessed by the contending powers.

The pulsar...an ancient weapon of unimaginable power, one that threatens the Confederation with total destruction. The Union is preparing for the final invasion, one that cannot fail with the great artifact at the head of their fleet. The clock is ticking quickly toward midnight. There is a chance to avoid annihilation, a small one. The Confederation has its own ancient device recovered from the Badlands, a stealth generator. It is not as powerful as the pulsar, but it just may be enough.

Admiral Tyler Barron and the Confederation navy face a new threat, darker and deadlier than any that have come before. The Confederation has just concluded its war with the Hegemony, but now that power, so long the hated enemy, is calling for help, for the Confederation to join it to face a deadly invasion, one likely to subjugate all humanity. Barron must overcome his own resentments, and the resistance of the Senate, and find a way to lead his forces into battle once more. The odds are long, but the stakes couldn’t be higher, no less than a choice between survival and freedom.

The Hegemony has launched the invasion Tyler Barron and his Confederation comrades have feared, and all the Rim is ablaze with the fires of war and destruction. The Hegemony has brought its vast fleets, its advanced technology, and its endless legions of grim cyborg warriors to impose its system of rigid genetic hierarchy over all humanity on the Rim. The Confederation fleet is outnumbered and outmatched, but they will fight nevertheless, struggling and dying to hold back the onslaught any way they can.

Tyler Barron is about to lead his fleet into a trap. He is sure the enemy is laying in wait, but he has no choice. After four years of unexpected calm along the front line, the Senate and the Hegemonic Council are demanding action, and the Pact’s commanding admiral has no choice but to set out on a mission to liberate the enemy-held regions of the Hegemony. While Tyler prepares for an offensive he believes can only end in disaster, Andi Lafarge is preparing to continue her quest for the mysterious weapon the doomed empire used to defeat the Highborn centuries before.

The Hegemony controls Megara, the Confederation’s capital. War has raged for five years. Millions are dead, vast fleets of ships have been destroyed. But in the stronghold where Tyler Barron and his comrades have gathered their allies and the last of their strength, a plan is being devised. Barron and his people have fought bravely, stubbornly, relentlessly, but the Hegemony has been too strong. Now, Barron is relying on the one source of strength that remains to him. Defiance.

The mysterious enemy has come, and Tyler Barron and his allies prepare for the final battle, the desperate struggle to save the Rim. Barron’s spacers are ready to fight, as always, but this time they know little of the enemy, and they face technology far beyond their own. They will fight to the end if necessary, battle with their final breaths to hold back the deadly enemy. They will stand alongside their old enemies, the Hegemony, united for one massive battle, one all out effort to stop the Highborn.

Tyler Barron and his associates are divided, split between two courses of action. Barron doesn't believe in the desperate plan to eradicate the Highborn, the strange virus that has been created for that purpose, but may or may not be the exact formula used by the empire 300 years ago. There are too many possible problems...a small difference in the virus, a cure created by the enemy...for him to accept the plan. Barron commits instead to a traditional defense, even though he knows the chances of ultimate success are almost zero.

The fleet fights on...deeper. Farther into the black unknown of space. There is no other path, no way for the lost to go save forward. Admiral Terrance Compton's fleet is cut off from Earth, deep in the heart of the enemy First Imperium. A third of his people have died in the year his force has been fleeing from its enemies, but he is as determined as ever to find a new home for his people, a way to save his war-torn fleet.

Hugh McDaniel lives in Queens, New York. He's a genius, and he has been struggling to pick one area to focus his life’s work on. His brother and best friend, Travis, is a marine officer. They get along very well, despite their differences. When aliens suddenly invade and destroy their entire culture, they are forced to struggle together in the ruins. At first they just tried to survive; to collect food, medicine, weapons, and to find other survivors. But now, they've set their sights higher: on resistance and reclaiming their planet from invaders.

Terrence Compton is one of Earth's greatest admirals, a warrior almost without equal. Alongside his oldest friend and brilliant colleague, Augustus Garret, he and his forces saved Earth from invasion by the robotic legions of the First Imperium's insane computer Regent. There is just one problem. The First Imperium was held back by the disruption of the sole warp gate connecting the two domains...and Compton and 300 of his ships are trapped on the wrong side, surrounded by the Regent's vast fleets and cut off from Earth.

The warrior culture of the Alliance has fragmented, and comrade fights comrade, brother kills brother. The Red Alliance forces, backed by the Union and its propaganda machine, have the advantage in numbers and position, and they are pushing forward, driving relentlessly toward the final attack. The Gray Alliance forces are weaker, trapped in the great Sentinel-2 fortress where they've established their headquarters. Their enemies have the larger fleets and armies, and control of the homeworld...but the Grays have Tyler Barron and Dauntless.

On the worlds of the Iron Belt, the heavily industrialized sector near the Confederation's Core, massive shipyards operate around the clock, producing the great vessels that can end the war. The Union knows it cannot win the economic struggle with its wealthier, more productive enemy, and Sector Nine, its feared spy agency, is not idle. Their focus is not on the front lines, the ravaged border between the two nations, but far off, beyond the Rim, in the strange, militaristic realm known as the Alliance.

Blackhawk: a wanderer, a man running from a dark and sinister past. A genetically-engineered warrior, a capable and accomplished killer, he is also a lost soul, a man who has fled to the deepest reaches of space seeking his true identity. The Far Stars: the farthest extent of human habitation in the galaxy, a sector of a hundred inhabited worlds, it is a dangerous expanse full of pirates, mercenaries, and cutthroats.