Duke Ron Marlboro has taken what is previously intended exploration fleet away from the planet Gildain and King Gerard. He had good reasons to do so with the latest involving his daughter, Fortune. The King wanted to arrange a marriage between himself and Fortune only because he thought the genetic mix would produce superior offspring for as his heir. He was not asking for her hand in marriage, but almost attempting to kidnap her and force her to submit to his will. Fortune isn’t that kind of timid young lady to do such a thing and when her Father found out, it was the last straw, so to speak.
Duke Marlboro had garnered a lot of popularity during the recent Zezner war which Gildain won. While Duke Marlboro was very instrumental in the win, his King didn’t like all the adulation his people were giving the Duke. He attempted to downplay Duke Marlboro’s substantial efforts, but that was some what thwarted when a Redion Axst of the Quest, a Zezner Prince, was assigned by his King as a bodyguard/protector to Duke Marlboro. That’s the position Ron accepted him in, not as an indentured slave as the Zezner expected. Redion has almost become a family member of the Marlboro house. Anyway, the Duke took his small incomplete fleet away from Gildain after a fierce land battle with the King’s forces. Now they were just outside an astroid belt and looking to take the derelict starship Exactas Meridias with his fleet to eventually try to find Earth.
The Exactas Meridias was much more than a starship. She was a floating city of a million inhabitants that had to be abandon during the Zezner War. She had all the industrial facilities that the Blue Sun Armada was ever going to need to process all the materials their long voyage was going to require. The only thing the Duke and his people needed to do was get it operational. That was going to be a huge problem. It was infested with some kind of intelligent creature that had created a giant rat-like animal which had been doing some kind of maintenance on the starship. These creatures were not set to fighting any of the Duke’s people that landed on it. They were almost unlimited in numbers are were serious threatening the first group lead by Victor, the Duke’s youngest Son. It got so bad that Fortune had to go after her brother and provide as much assistance as she could. They were fighting against millions of these rat creatures with a few human-like creatures that showed up to kind of direct this rat army. If the Marlboro people can’t kill this infection to the Exactas Meridias, their chance of surviving the long voyage ahead of them wasn’t looking good.
At the same time this was going on, King Gerard had gathered his remaining loyal Dukes and they were in hot pursuit of Duke Marlboro. Most of the other nobility with Duke Marlboro thought the King’s fleet would soon halt and no longer force the pursuit. They didn’t believe the King really wanted any of them back, but it didn’t appear that was the case. The King’s fleet was coming full on and the Blue Sun Armada was definitely out gunned. Then the Talgar showed up!
The Talgar were supposedly the race of previously unknown aliens that set the Zezner up to fight Gildain. They were a serious mysterious to the Zezner, even revered like gods, which they weren’t. Still, they were an unknown even to Redion who had never seen a Talgar nor was he allowed to look upon one if he did have the chance. His chance came when a Talgar ship showed up in close proximity to the BSA flagship Indomitable. They asked specifically to speak with Duke Ron Marlboro! No one had a clue as to how this conversation was going to turn out. Was this a new enemy or could they become allies. Read and find out.
There will be more books in this series, but the title or publication date has not been identified. We’ll just have to watch for it.