Showing results by author "Vaughn Heppner" in All Categories

The brutal war expands to the Jupiter System, in this, the fourth book of the series. As the Mars Campaign ends, stealth-capsules launch from the Neptune System. Months later, they glide into the Confederation of Jovian Moons. Cyborgs emerge to begin phase one among the Homo sapiens.The Jovians follow the Dictates, a perfected philosophy where the rational rule, the spirited fight, and the brutish labor. The moons have wealth, a powerful fleet, and hardened Secessionists who want freedom from the Dictates.

One by one, the moons and habitats of the Outer Planets have gone silent: Neptune, Uranus and Saturn. After the cyborg assault against the Jupiter System, the reasons seem obvious. Those of the Inner Planets desperately scan the void for sign of a cyborg invasion fleet. Finally, one man discovers a blip. The blip becomes something terrifying: Asteroids hurtling toward Earth. The asteroids bristle with lasers turrets and missiles, and their velocity and heading can only mean one thing.

A nuclear attack in the Persian Gulf wrongly implicates Jake Bayard. Everyone seems to be hunting for him. Bayard flees to Garm, an ice-age world full of sabertooths, dire wolves, mammoths, and Neanderthals. Unfortunately, Institute Homo habilises are also there: extraterrestrial, crafty, small, and deadly hominids. They've enslaved the Neanderthals to mine for dreaded alibite.

Jake Bayard led tormented Neanderthals in a successful slave revolt on the planet Garm. But when the Corporation owners fled, they took all the women with them. The Neanderthals are blaming Bayard for their lack of mates, and every day that passes is making the lonely brutes angrier. Bayard needs a solution fast, or his former friends are going to string him up. He decides to risk a raid onto Saddoth where millions of Ophidians eat and keep herds of meat Neanderthals. He can only take nine with his traveling power—nine to free nubile females for the Neanderthals of Garm.

Earth becomes too hot for Jake Bayard. Too many shape-shifting aliens and people, including those on his own side, are trying to capture him in order to use his star-traveling abilities for their own greedy ends. Bayard flees to Kaldar, a world devastated by atomic war and lousy with mutated rat-men and the Dark Brotherhood. At first, he’s just trying to stay alive. Then, he uncovers a mystery, one that, incredible as it seems, reaches all the way back to Earth. It could mean the alien enslavement of everyone, which means that Bayard is fighting for more than just his own survival.