Showing results by author "Rick Partlow" in All Categories

Jack Bennet returns from the war to find the life he left behind has moved on without him. The only option he has to make ends meet lies in a military surplus junkyard starship. What’s a former Combat Search and Rescue soldier to do? Fix up the ship, hire the cheapest pilot—a notorious drunk—and take the first contract that comes up: collect a bounty on one of the most ruthless killers in the Pirate Worlds, a place crawling with thieves, cutthroats and con artists whose primary language is violence. Jack must abandon his nice guy persona, or exploit it, if he is to survive.

As a sci-fi author with a hit TV show, I have a few ideas about what alien invaders are supposed to look like. In my stories, they’re technologically advanced monsters, with tentacles, and no faces. Turns out I was right about the technology. And about how angry they’d be. But the way they look…that’s more terrifying than even I could have imagined. They look exactly like us. Because they are us.

So close to home... And yet farther away than ever. Cam, Vicky, and the others follow the jump gate line into the Reconstructor systems, hoping to find the Northwest Passage back to Earth…back home. Instead, they find death and destruction. And an ancient mystery.

Jason McKay and Shannon Stark, two young Republic Space Fleet Intelligence officers, are given the leadership of a new special ops unit. The mission? Guard the spoiled daughter of an important senator. Neither thought the mission would be anything more than babysitting....Until the aliens invaded the colony. Implacable, relentless, merciless - the armored creatures will slaughter anyone. Survival will be the least of their challenges, as Jason and Shannon are forced to weigh the lives of the people they lead, and the ones they love, against their duty, honor, and planet.

Four complete books. Explosive, military sci-fi action completes the entire second arc of the best-selling Drop Trooper Series.

Go to war or go to jail. For small-time street hustler Cam Alvarez, the choice is simple.... He has no family, no friends, no place in the world...nothing to lose. When his latest con results in the death of a cartel hit man, Cam opts to join the Marines and leave Earth to fight a vicious alien enemy. Drafted into the Marine Drop-Troopers, Cam discovers there’s one thing he’s even better at than running street-con games, and that’s killing the enemy.

Hard times make for strong men, and Antonin Murdock’s childhood was as rough as it gets. Now, he’s a Ranger, the only law for colonists seeking their fortune far from home. Murdock’s investigation into a missing freighter takes him to Coracaesium, a world he discovers has been turned into a stronghold by brutal pirate forces. They are more organized than anything he’s seen before, equipped with advanced weaponry, and led by a tactical and strategic genius.

It was every starship captain’s nightmare, and for Travis Miller, it was his own personal hell. He’d done everything by the book, but when the Tahni had attacked him and his crew, there was no choice but to return fire and destroy the first alien vessel humans had ever encountered. Excoriated in the press, his career in shambles, Travis is exiled to a long patrol of the outer colony worlds. Forgotten, except as a bad example...until the Tahni prove him right by declaring war on the human commonwealth.

Sanctuary. The perfect refuge from the enemy, the most closely held secret of the resistance, the planet has never been found, never been attacked. Until now. Charlie Travers has been preparing to strike at the Anguilar with the help of the US military, intent on going on the offense, but no battle plan survives contact with the enemy...particularly not when that enemy is General Zan-Tar.

The resistance has been playing defense too long. Now that Charlie knows about the Imperial Redoubt, a starship the size of a planet that guards the Emperor and the bloodline families from all threats, he's decided it's time to take the fight to them. And if trying to infiltrate the heart of the enemy's stronghold is a suicide mission, Charlie, Laranna and Gib can't think of a better way to go out.

The Anguilar are scavengers chased out of their own galaxy by an implacable enemy. It took Charlie and his friends in the resistance two years to finally defeat them in a desperate gambit that was very nearly a suicide mission. The threat from the Anguilar is gone, but the predators who chased them out of their galaxy have followed them here, looking for vengeance.

You can’t fight a war without guns. Charlie and his friends need to arm their ship, but they have a small problem—black market particle cannons cost a lot of money. And they don’t have any. Which leaves them only one option. They have to steal the guns from the Anguilar Empire. It’s a daring plan, but it backfires when Laranna is captured by the enemy and taken back to her homeworld of Strada, which has been conquered and garrisoned by the Empire.

Charlie Travers figures his life can’t get much worse. He lives over a pizza restaurant, he’s lost his girlfriend, and has no prospects for a career. Then, he’s abducted by an alien robot and taken across the galaxy. When he wakes up, he finds himself stranded thousands of light-years away, and about to be killed by space pirates.

Charlie and the others hadn’t set out to free the galaxy, but fate had other plans...and so did the ancient AI robot, Lenny, who brought them together. And brought them to Sanctuary. Now, a whole planet of Copperell refugees looks to Charlie for leadership, and his first task as their commander is to find weapons to arm the AI-guided zoo ships that are their only military fleet. And only the Anguilar have the weapons they need.

Charlie Travers has been away from home for a long time, fighting to free the galaxy from the tyranny of the Anguilar Empire. But now the Anguilar know where that home is...and it's only a matter of time before they set their sights on Earth, intent on conquest and enslavement. Charlie doesn't have enough troops or supplies to stop them. And there's only one place he can get them.

Brent Parthet just wanted to be left alone. A deadly supercommando in the Southwind War, Brent had retired a hero to a wildlife preserve as far from civilization as possible to enjoy the simple life with his wife and young son. But when one of the Southwind, the massive, genetically-engineered slaves who'd rebelled against their human masters, shows up at Brent's door, asking for help from an old enemy, Brent will find out that the war isn't really over. And he may have been fighting for the wrong side.

The war is over...or that's what everyone thinks. Cam knows better. The Skrela are wiped out, but only Cam and Vicky know the truth, that Dwight and the other AI like him created the monstrous enemy to destroy the Predecessors. Burdened with this terrible secret, Cam must somehow maintain the tenuous peace between the humans and the Tahni until he and his Marines can return home.

Cameron Alvarez and the crew of the Orion are hot on the trail of the Seekers, following the Predecessor faction on their quest to find the source of the Skrela infestation. But the crew is close to the breaking point, and their commander, Colonel Hachette, is long past it. The death of Sgt. Major Campbell has left him devastated and unable to lead.

Charlie has accepted a commission in the US Army and the duty to build Earth's defenses before the Anguilar return for a larger attack to conquer his homeworld once and for all. But Giblet has other ideas. Obsessed with revenge against the Anguilar General Zan-Tar for the death of the woman he loved, Gib steals a starfighter and sets off on a suicide mission for the heart of the Anguilar Empire. Charlie is forced to make a decision: do his duty to his home and his people...or race to save his friend on the road of vengeance.

Charlie Travers didn’t ask to be the leader of a rebellion…but no one else wanted the job. Now that he’s gathered an army and armed them with the deadliest starfighter ever made, the legendary Vanguards, he just needs one more thing: someone who knows how to fly the things. Unfortunately, no one has been behind the stick of a Vanguard in hundreds of years, since the end of the war that threw the galaxy into chaos. Their only hope lays in the legends of a crashed ship, a fighter crew frozen in stasis for centuries.