Battlecry

StarFight #3

by T. Jackson King

Jacob Renselaer arrives in the Kepler 22 system, carrying a wasp ambassador as a sign of humanity’s hope for an end to its first interstellar war. But that hope crumbles as Jacob, his girlfriend Daisy, ambassador Hunter One and Marine chief O’Connor watch unknown aliens drop thermos-nukes on the wasp colony world, killing wasp larvae and adults. These new aliens pursue Jacob’s ships and a fleeing wasp ship. To Jacob’s horror, the new aliens attack with mobile balls of antimatter! Facing sure death, Jacob retreats to the Kepler 63 wasp colony world where Hunter One demands that he and his fleet defend a colony with 23 million wasps. Where does his duty lie? Must he fight and risk lives and ships to protect their former enemies? Or will help arrive from his father the admiral, or from other wasps? When the shark-seal aliens arrive at Kepler 63, battles happen that threaten the lives of all three peoples—human, wasp and amphibian. Can Jacob and his friends win a fight where they are badly outnumbered? Or will a fight to defend wasp civilians end in the destruction of the Battlestar Lepanto and all of Jacob’s hopes for a future with Daisy? All that is certain is that the amphibian aliens are relentless, their mobile antimatter balls are something no ship can escape and communication is impossible with creatures who talk with skin color patterns!

246 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 11, 2017

About the author

T. Jackson King (Tom) is an Amazon bestselling science fiction and urban fantasy author. He is a lifelong reader of SciFi/Fantasy stories and his favorite authors have included Darynda Jones, BR Kingsolver, K.F. Breene, Martha Carr, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Andre Norton, J. K. Rowling, Ann Christy, Lois McMaster Bujold and Ursula LeGuin. Outside of fantasy and science fiction he has enjoyed the novels of Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and the urban fantasy crime mysteries of Darynda Jones.

Tom began writing SF novels at age 38, when he discovered he had read all the Human-Alien first contact or encounter novels in his local library. So he decided to write his own, thanks to an overactive, very visual imagination. Those early years produced FIRST CONTACT and RETREAD SHOP. When the New York City publishing houses ignored his later novels because they had no Hollywood tie-in, he went to several small presses, then began self-publishing as an Indy author in 2011. He loves that readers in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia are some of his most loyal readers!

Before becoming a bestselling author, Tom worked in a radiocarbon lab at UC Riverside and earned an MA degree in Archaeology from UCLA. His interests in ancient history, ancient cultures and journalism got him several government agency jobs that led him to roam the raw landscape of the Western United States where he worked as a federal archaeologist and newspaper journalist.

Tom lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA and hangs with a group of smart and tolerant Westerners. Divorce taught him to smile a lot and to work at being a Nice Guy. Which earned him the love of his wife Sue. Still, he is pretty weird. Has been since fourth grade when he began reading SciFi. Since then, he and Authority have rarely been in agreement. Readers are welcome to visit his T. Jackson King page.