Showing results by author "Rick Partlow" in All Categories

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 is more terrifying than even I could have imagined. They look exactly like us. Because they are us.

The Hive Mind has deceived the Americans and the Thacians into believing they had the strategy that would destroy it once and for all…and instead, they opened the gates through to Thacia and, from there, into the United States. And the demons streamed through by the tens of thousands, too many for artillery and air support to drive them back. The Army and Air Force keep pouring on the hurt, but it’s only a matter of time until they’re forced to do the unthinkable…nuke an American city.

All Cam Alvarez has known is war. For three years, he’s fought the marauding alien Tahni on one God-forsaken planet after another, leading a squad of armored Drop Troopers. But the war is about to change. Cam is an officer now, fresh out of OCS and taking charge of his old platoon, and things have reached a tipping point. Instead of fighting a desperate holding action against the enemy, the Commonwealth is finally ready to take back the human colonies the Tahni seized early in the war. To free the people the enemy have kept as human shields.

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.

Contains books one and two of The Acheron series: The Acheron and The Prodigal. Sandi and Ash never set out to be heroes. She joined the Fleet to please her mother, the Admiral. He signed up to escape the grinding poverty of the Housing Blocks. And the unlikely friends envisioned boring, peacetime careers as shuttle pilots. The Tahni Imperium had other ideas.

Hausos is a peaceful farming colony. Once controlled by the Tahni, it's now settled by a collection of homeless refugees and war veterans, among them Cam and Vicky. Their life is pleasantly boring, quiet enough for demons from the war to nag at the corners of Cam’s mind on lonely nights. He fights the demons back with willpower and alcohol, determined to make this place home. But the peace doesn’t last.

The good guys won the battle, but the war goes on. Wash Williams has been recruited to help Brian Reeves and the Delta Force team close gates to the worlds controlled by the Hive-Mind, while back on Thacia, Valon does the same thing from the other side. But new gates continue to open, and unless someone can figure out how to stop the effect, it will keep spreading and the war will never end.

Terribly wounded during the battle for Hermes, Ryan Hendrix was repaired with cybernetics, transformed into a weapon by Fleet Intelligence...and covertly dropped onto the enemy-occupied colony at Aphrodite to sabotage the enemy and build up a civilian resistance. While Ryan fights the real battle behind enemy lines, Travis Miller and Jessica Leer struggle with politics...and their new commands.

The Jeuta commander, Alvar, has ravaged Wholesale Slaughter’s base on Revelation and taken Katy prisoner. He's holding her hostage to force Logan, the new appointed Guardian of Sparta, to come to them. Alvar hopes his death will throw the whole Dominion into disarray and confusion, making them ripe for invasion. The Spartan Council believes Alvar is right and don’t want to allow Logan to sacrifice himself to save his wife and unborn child...and they definitely don’t want him to take Sparta’s most advanced ship, the Shakak, on the mission.

Logan Conner thinks his days pretending to be mercenary captain Jonathan Slaughter are behind him now that the ancient Imperial outpost of Terminus Cut has been uncovered. He’s returned to his duties while his brother, Terrin, leads a team of scientists studying the lost technology of the fallen empire. But the Starkad Supremacy knows their secrets, and they aren’t going to allow their rivals the military advantage of the Imperial technology. They’re coming for it and for Terrin.

General Bradstreet and the American forces on Mars have defeated the incursion by the insectoid Seekers, but at a heavy cost. The Morrigan is nearly out of reaction mass and can’t make it back to Earth, both landers have been destroyed and they have greater than fifty percent casualties. They’re stranded on Mars, saved only by the shelter of the Visitor ship. Until, miraculously, help arrives in the form of a new alliance with the French Coalition government, which provides a resupply ship filled with food, fuel, and reinforcements… both US Marines and French Special Forces. They’re saved.

Chase and Angel have two of the three artifacts they need to access the ancient alien Archive—humanity’s only hope of defeating the Sunkillers. But getting that third one is going to be near impossible. Because their nemesis, the power-hungry Hart-Klein Consolidated, already has the third key to the Archive...and they won’t be giving it up without a fight. Who can Chase and the rest of the crew of the Tamar turn to for help when their own government thinks they’re outlaws and they have a price on their heads?

Cam Alvarez and Vicky Sandoval have pursued the renegade, Tahni Zan-Thint, to his refuge in the outlaw cartels of the Pirate Worlds. On a planet of endless ocean and volcanic fury, Zan-Thint is coming ever closer to learning the secrets of the ancient alien weapons he’s discovered. And if Cam and Vicky can’t stop him, he’ll unleash the wrath of a long-dead civilization on all humanity.

I thought the hard part of helping the Helta defeat the rampaging Tevynians would be the fighting. How wrong I was. To the Helta, we Earthers look just like the Tevynians, their mortal enemies. And convincing their government to ally with humans may be even beyond the crew of the starship James Bowie. But the clock is ticking, because the Tevynian fleet is bearing down on the Helta homeworld. If we can’t talk the Helta into accepting our help to fight them off, then Helta Prime will fall.... And Earth will be next.

Some enemies just won’t die.... Return to the star-spanning human Republic of Duty, Honor, Planet as Chief of Fleet Intelligence Jason McKay and his deadly Executive Officer Shannon Stark take on another dire threat to humanity! General Antonov’s Protectorate returns to menace the Republic from without, while a possible military coup gestates within its borders. Are the two connected? Will McKay and Stark be able to put the pieces together before it’s too late?

A disgraced ex-cop, framed by a crooked politician, abandoned by his family, he’s forced into the life of a bounty hunter just to survive. Tracking down a traitor who stole military grade weapons to sell on the black market, Masterson finds out things aren’t as simple as the wanted poster made them seem. Because Delia Beckett isn’t a traitor, simply a patsy, and the forces manipulating her may be the same ones responsible for Masterson’s fall from grace.

To do the right thing isn’t always to do the easy thing, and for Commonwealth Ranger, Antonin Murdock, that’s a lesson he’s learning the hard way. After the cataclysmic battle with Sanyo Baretto’s forces, the true architect of the Pirate Wars emerges from the shadows. Now, Murdock’s on the run. Baretto’s pirates are as cunning as they are resourceful, the Commonwealth Fleet is a titanic juggernaut, and both are closing in fast. With few friends left, it’s a good thing the ones he does have are the best.

That fiancee? She’s married—to another guy. The family business? His parents sold it. 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?

It's the final showdown between Cam and a rogue Tahni general.... And it might be the end of everything. Cam and Vicky are chasing down Zan-Thint to his last fortress, a lifeless world deep in Tahni space. If they can't take him down before he activates an ancient alien weapon, a swarm of biomechanical killing machines will wipe out all life in the Commonwealth.

Earth is in turmoil. The enemy is bearing down on us with every warship they have, and our only allies are in chaos. Our one hope for survival is Andy Clanton - a hack science fiction writer trying to convince some aliens that humans are worth saving. It’s an uphill battle, because to the aliens, we are the monsters. We look just like their sworn enemies, the Tevynians, who’ve sworn to wipe out both our civilizations. When everything falls apart and the fate of the galaxy is on the line, can Andy Clanton pull our fat out of the fire?