Showing results by author "Jay Allan"

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 war is over, but the struggle continues. Tyler Barron and his spacers have set out into the unknown, deep into the Badlands, seeking to discover the empire’s old tech and the secrets of its tortured history before Gaston Villieneuve and the resurgent Union can beat them to it. The White Fleet is a vast force, powerful, and crewed by the toughest veterans from the war. Barron and his people know the future of the Confederation, even its survival, depends on recovering the scientific secrets of the empire before the enemy can do the same.

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.

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.

Are you a high potential? Your managers and HR department are constantly wondering that about you - and assessing whether or not you have what it takes to advance. Here's how to get them to answer yes. Being seen as a high potential leader is essential to getting promoted and reaching an organization's upper echelons, but most companies keep their top talent list a closely guarded secret. And the assessment process they use to decide who is and isn't a future leader is an even greater mystery.

The Alliance and its colonies have called a truce and signed the Confederation Agreement, providing the frontier worlds with guarantees of self-government. No one expects the deal to last, and both sides are preparing for the next showdown. But from the depths of space another challenge is coming, one that will endanger the very survival of mankind and force not just the Alliance and its colonies, but all of the Superpowers, to join forces or face annihilation.

An industrial hell. The foulest and most decrepit slum on Parsephon. A nest of human misery, where hope is word long forgotten, and the dead are carted away every day. It is the worst pit in the Confederation’s great industrial machine known as the Iron Belt. Among the millions born into misery, poverty, and despair under the dark and smoky haze that covers the planet, Andromeda Lafarge is unique. One lost soul among billions, she is tough, relentless, determined to get out, to escape, to blaze her own trail, and to make a name for herself across the stars.   

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.

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.

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.

The White Fleet had been an expression of optimism, a grand expedition to explore the vast reaches of the long-dead empire. Tasked to uncover the secrets of the devastating Cataclysm and to seek and recover the advanced ancient technology that humanity had once possessed, it found something else instead. A new enemy. A vast domain, one with advanced technology, massive fleets, and a genetically-ordered society and hierarchy it intends to impose on all humanity everywhere. The Hegemony is like nothing Tyler Barron and his comrades have ever encountered - but the veteran admiral must find a way to fight the far superior enemy....

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.

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.

The Third Frontier War is over, and the Western Alliance is triumphant. All across human-occupied space, colony worlds celebrate the coming of peace. But peace is an elusive dream, and more trouble is brewing. The war was expensive, and the economies of the Superpowers, always fragile, are on the verge of total collapse. The Directorate, the shadowy intelligence organization that has become the true power behind the Alliance government, plans to strip the colonies bare to pay the costs of war.

The Third Frontier War is raging, and all across human-occupied space worlds are burning. Massive fleets struggle for dominance and kilometer-long war ships exchange thermonuclear barrages. Battered in the early years of the war, the Western Alliance is resurgent. The brilliant Admiral Augustus Garret leads the Alliance fleet from victory to victory, taking the war to the very heart of the enemy empires.

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.

Earth Two. A new home for the survivors of the fleet, the men and women who battled against seemingly insurmountable odds to survive the assault of the First Imperium and to destroy the homicidal Regent, the artificial intelligence committed to their destruction. They have prospered in the years since their arrival, adapting the technology of the First Imperium to build a new and prosperous republic. But as the fear of the First Imperium recedes, cracks have begun to appear, conflicts looming that threaten to destroy all they have worked to achieve.

When the Far Stars came under imperial attack, Astra Lucerne - the daughter and successor of the Far Stars’ greatest conqueror - Marshal Augustin Lucerne - rallied her father’s confederation forces to defend their worlds. They were joined in the fight by former imperial general Arkarin Blackhawk, a warrior whose skills and brutality made him infamous, and who has, for two decades, sought the redemption he knows is unreachable.

Earth Two is a world beset by dangers, inside and out. Its genetic groupings, the cloned “Tanks”, the “Natural Borns”, and the hybrid “Mules” exist uneasily, each wary of the others, even as they rally to face the deadly threat of the First Imperium’s robot warriors. President Max Harmon and his inner circle have played an elaborate game of chess for 12 years, a deadly battle of wits with the genocidal alien intelligence known as the Regent. They have moved fleets, spread deceptions, built decoy planets...all to hide Earth Two’s location, to protect it from the deadly onslaught of the enemy.