Showing results by author "Rick Partlow" in All Categories

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? Fix up the ship, hire the cheapest pilot—a notorious drunk—and take the first contract that comes up: collect a bounty on one of the most ruthless killers in the Pirate Worlds, a place crawling with thieves, cutthroats and con artists whose primary language is violence. Jack must abandon his nice guy persona, or exploit it, if he is to survive.

Go to war or go to jail. For small-time street hustler Cam Alvarez, the choice is simple.... He has no family, no friends, no place in the world...nothing to lose. When his latest con results in the death of a cartel hit man, Cam opts to join the Marines and leave Earth to fight a vicious alien enemy. Drafted into the Marine Drop-Troopers, Cam discovers there’s one thing he’s even better at than running street-con games, and that’s killing the enemy.

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…that’s more terrifying than even I could have imagined. They look exactly like us. Because they are us.

Jason McKay and Shannon Stark, two young Republic Space Fleet Intelligence officers, are given the leadership of a new special ops unit. The mission? Guard the spoiled daughter of an important senator. Neither thought the mission would be anything more than babysitting....Until the aliens invaded the colony. Implacable, relentless, merciless - the armored creatures will slaughter anyone. Survival will be the least of their challenges, as Jason and Shannon are forced to weigh the lives of the people they lead, and the ones they love, against their duty, honor, and planet.

Grant Masterson is a man with nothing left to lose.... 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.

The Zha'-Rath can control the minds of sentient beings, can turn them into spies, drones and zombies, and nothing can stop them. Except Varnell. Gib's people are immune to the mind control and can deprogram its victims with just their voices. But the Varnell are exiles, treated like the con artists and criminals they've become, not likely to volunteer for a dangerous mission to save all the worlds who've oppressed them for centuries.

Cameron Alvarez is a Marine Drop Trooper and Marines are no stranger to sacrifice. He was willing to sacrifice his life to protect the innocent, but what’s he’s been asked to give up now is far worse. Having subjected himself to the transformation virus, become linked to the power of another universe, Cam may have sacrificed his sanity—and his soul. The ghosts of that universe haunt him now, whispering in every unguarded moment, trying to turn him against the ones he loves.

After his mom died from cancer, Wash gave up his girlfriend and his dream of being a career Army officer to stay home and take care of his father, a former Special Forces soldier stricken with PTSD. Wash works three jobs just to pay the bills, and one of them is at the ranch of the man who’s engaged to his exgirlfriend, Jimmy Bonner. Sound rough? He thought so too … until a portal to a hell-world of giant, insectoid aliens opens behind the ranch house, sucking Wash and Jimmy into the nightmare domain of the Hive Mind.

Dr. Erik Manheim needed a warrior. A Navy SEAL. Someone who could help him confront the threat he uncovered in ancient ruins—evidence that a rogue planet brings devastation every time it passes Earth. Instead, he got Jack Schafer, a hungover bush pilot in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, Jack is swept into a mission he was never meant to survive—one that stretches from the Alaskan wilderness to the stars beyond. Humanity's future hangs in the balance… and its best hope may be a reluctant pilot who wasn't supposed to be here at all.

Jack Schafer saved Earth by accident. Saving his newly adopted home, Dravos, won't be any easier. Dravos has fallen into a new star system, sunlight blazing down on a civilization that's never known day or night. Its people are terrified. Its nobles are plotting. Its king wants answers Jack doesn't have. And the Archon Draven—the centuries-old tyrant Jack thought he'd disposed of—is recovering in the mountains, preparing for his next move. With rebellion spreading and old enemies becoming uneasy allies, Jack, Lisa, and Erik must hold a fragile kingdom together long enough to strike back.

The resistance has been playing defense too long. Now that Charlie knows about the Imperial Redoubt, a starship the size of a planet that guards the Emperor and the bloodline families from all threats, he's decided it's time to take the fight to them. And if trying to infiltrate the heart of the enemy's stronghold is a suicide mission, Charlie, Laranna and Gib can't think of a better way to go out.

Charlie and his allies have been trying desperately for months to find a way to prevent the Zha'-Rath swarm from their endgame, from conquering Earth to turn it into a hive, using humans to breed their young...and feed them.

For small-time street hustler Cam Alvarez, the choice is simple. He has no family, no friends, no place in the world...nothing to lose. When his latest con results in the death of a cartel hitman, Cam opts to join the Marines and leave Earth to fight a vicious alien enemy.

It was every starship captain’s nightmare, and for Travis Miller, it was his own personal hell. He’d done everything by the book, but when the Tahni had attacked him and his crew, there was no choice but to return fire and destroy the first alien vessel humans had ever encountered. Excoriated in the press, his career in shambles, Travis is exiled to a long patrol of the outer colony worlds. Forgotten, except as a bad example...until the Tahni prove him right by declaring war on the human commonwealth.

Cam Alvarez is lost in the depths of the galaxy…and the only way home is through a horde of alien monsters. Cam and the others in the task force have followed Zan Thint through the Predecessor Gateway to another spiral arm of the galaxy. There, they are stranded…unless they can find another of the gateways. Following the trail of the Predecessors, who’d fled our space millennia ago, they discover one lost civilization after another…but will they find the Predecessors?

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?

The Anguilar are scavengers chased out of their own galaxy by an implacable enemy. It took Charlie and his friends in the resistance two years to finally defeat them in a desperate gambit that was very nearly a suicide mission. The threat from the Anguilar is gone, but the predators who chased them out of their galaxy have followed them here, looking for vengeance.

Hard times make for strong men, and Antonin Murdock’s childhood was as rough as it gets. Now, he’s a Ranger, the only law for colonists seeking their fortune far from home. Murdock’s investigation into a missing freighter takes him to Coracaesium, a world he discovers has been turned into a stronghold by brutal pirate forces. They are more organized than anything he’s seen before, equipped with advanced weaponry, and led by a tactical and strategic genius.

Charlie Travers figures his life can’t get much worse. He lives over a pizza restaurant, he’s lost his girlfriend, and has no prospects for a career. Then, he’s abducted by an alien robot and taken across the galaxy. When he wakes up, he finds himself stranded thousands of light-years away, and about to be killed by space pirates.

Das Ende ist nahe …Der Krieg mit den Tahni zieht sich seit über zwei Jahren hin und fordert von allen Beteiligten einen hohen Blutzoll. In der Aphrodite-Kolonie bereitet Ryan Hendrix, der vom Marineinfanteristen in einen kybernetischen Kommandosoldaten verwandelt wurde, seine Miliz auf einen letzten Angriff gegen den Feind vor, der zu einem Himmelfahrtskommando werden könnte.