Sunday, January 11, 2015

New Audiobook Editions

The Ten Thousand and The Fall are now available in audiobook format.



The Ten Thousand (Portal Wars II)




General Jake Taylor and his army of cyborg soldiers are veterans of Erastus, a planet so brutal, so hellish, it is called Gehenna by the men sent to fight and die there.  He and his comrades battled for years in the most appalling conditions human beings have ever endured, believing the entire time they were protecting Earth from bloodthirsty alien monsters.  But it was all a lie, the cynical propaganda of the totalitarian regime that rules over all mankind.

The alien Tegeri, and their bio-mechanical soldiers Taylor’s men call the Machines, were the victims, innocent targets of human aggression.  Taylor and the rest of the Earth soldiers have unwittingly been the aggressors.  When the Tegeri chose Taylor as their contact and told him the horrible truth, he rallied the veterans of Erastus for a new battle, one to free Earth from its self-appointed masters.
Taylor’s soldiers begin the long campaign back toward Earth, toward a reckoning with the brutal government they are sworn to destroy.  The heart of this force is the Ten Thousand, surgically-altered Supersoldiers, products of an experimental enhancement program and the first of their kind.  But they are not the last, and on the planet Juno they will meet their counterparts, the Black Corps, a force created by the Earth government specifically to destroy them.  The Black Corps outnumbers Taylor’s soldiers 2-1, and they have a vast advantage in supply and logistical support.  But Taylor’s men are veterans of the furnace of Gehenna, and they don’t die easily.

But there is more at stake than the freedom of humanity, greater stakes than even Taylor can imagine.  For there is another alien race, one shrouded in legend and myth, known to the Tegeri only as the Darkness.  Long ago the Darkness made war on the Ancients, the mighty beings that built the interstellar Portals and mentored the fledgling Tegeri race eons ago.  The Ancients are remembered in Tegeri lore as wise and powerful…almost as gods.  But they fell ages past, destroyed utterly by the Darkness.

Now that great evil is returning, and this time it will destroy not only mankind and the Tegeri, but all the fledgling races the Ancients planted, hundreds of young species, only now grasping for civilization.  

The Ancients long ago foretold that an alliance of men and Tegeri would stand and defeat the Darkness, and save the galaxy from destruction.  But if this prophecy is to come to pass, Taylor and his men must destroy their enemies and bring the dark truth to mankind, that there is another war to fight, vaster and more terrible than any in human history or legend.




The Fall (Crimson Worlds IX)




The Epic Conclusion to the Crimson Worlds Series…

Erik Cain is the hero of the Marine Corps, a celebrated warrior who has led his grim veterans into every war the Alliance and mankind have faced.  But now he has left the Corps, driven to near madness by an overwhelming need for vengeance.  He has sworn to kill Gavin Stark, the madman responsible for his mentor’s death and, with a small band of dedicated followers, he is pursuing his prey across occupied space.

Meanwhile, on a dozen colony worlds, Marines land to face the occupying forces of Stark’s Shadow Legions.  They are supported by the Janissaries, their longtime enemies, now turned allies, but they are exhausted and outnumbered, facing a vastly superior enemy entrenched and waiting for them.  But they are veterans, Marines and Janissaries both, men and women who have battled the armies of the First Imperium and lived to tell the tale.  They know what is at stake, and they are determined to prevail, even if none of them come back. 

And on Earth, the economic collapse Stark engineered has shattered the Treaty of Paris and its century-long prohibition against terrestrial warfare.  Millions are already dead as the war between the Superpowers spreads across the Earth, a growing conflagration that could end in apocalyptic nuclear, chemical, and biological exchanges between the powers.

Will mankind live under the iron boot of Gavin Stark and his clone descendants forever?  Or will Erik Cain and the Marines defeat him once and for all?