Big Boys Don't Cry

Not many people think of it this way, but the Boloverse, as in the late Keith Laumer's Bolos and the spin-offs, is one of the most liberal themes in science fiction. It's especially funny precisely because almost nobody understands that it's liberal. Why do I say it's liberal? Because it's all about the easy, certain, and reliable programming of altruistic values in sentient beings. Brother, sister, that's the penultimate CORE of liberalism. Interestingly, since the stories can move even me, it suggests to me that we ALL have some liberal in us.

Big Boys Don't Cry isn't a Bolo story, either in the special military technical details or in the theme. What it is, though, is a deconstruction of that liberal meme on the easy, certain, and reliable programming of altruism in sentient beings.

It's also, I think, a pretty good story.

published February 2014

To purchase at Amazon, click here

Come and Take Them

Carrera Series

Carrera. Relentless. Machiavellian. Without compunction. Victorious. Pity his enemies. Be thankful he is on the side of freedom from totalitarian domination.

On the colony planet of Terra Nova, soldier turned political leader Carrera has achieved his revenge, destroying those who killed his wife and children in a terrorist strike, and helping to establish a free country. But Carrera’s fight is not over.

War with the Tauran Union is inevitable. Carrera has been preparing his new country for this all-out conflict for years, intending to drive out the last vestige of foreign imperialism in Balboa, the Tauran Union Security Force. He doesn’t care that he’s outnumbered one hundred to one. He doesn’t care that the Taurans are one thousand times wealthier. A true Machiavellian, Carrera is convinced that gold cannot always find good soldiers, but that good soldiers can always find gold. After all, his good soldiers have already found quite a bit. Moreover, he’s been preparing for the war he intends to start and fight on his own terms, while the TU has been preparing for a progressive fantasy.

But then his own government calls a halt even as the commander of the United Earth Peace Fleet, High Admiral Marguerite Wallenstein, injects a dose of realism and spine into the Tauran Union. Any other government, giving similar orders, Carrera would overthrow without hesitation. But this is his own creation; he must follow these orders.

But the Taurans are provoking Balboa mercilessly, and Carrera knows that sooner or later, he must fight—only now the task will be more difficult and more bloody. No matter. When that time comes, Carerra knows he will do whatever it takes to win. He is, after all, Carrera.

published November 2013

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

Countdown: H Hour

Countdown Series

Welcome to the Philippines outback. It's a true garden spot, if you happen to like drug running, bush-bound revolutionary movements, Balkanized tribal warfare, illegal weapons trading, and kidnapping for fun and profit. It's hostage rescue time once again for Terry Welch's special operations company. But this is turning out to be one of those missions. Starting with no clue as to the hostage's whereabouts topped off by Welch and his crew having to endure a rifle company of hated competitors supposedly sent along for reinforcement.

Part of the territory for Welch. But then an attack on both companies' home bases leaves families and friends under threat of death and any available support scurrying to defend. Worse, advance team members sent to reconnoiter have been taken hostage as well. No help, no backup, team members in the soup.

Welch knows there's only one solution: do whatever it takes. This is H Hour. And the fight is on.

published August 2012

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

Countdown: M Day

Countdown Series

War is brutal. Colonel Wes Stauer gets it. He ought to. He was once one of war's most brutal practitioners not to mention one of its most effective and least bloody. Brutal yes; stupid no. Now, not only must Stauer command his crack outfit of former comrades and pull off yet another miracle mission, he must also harness and direct the brute within himself a beast he will need in order to destroy an intelligent enemy who is as implacable as Stauer himself. Okay, almost as implacable. There will be war. And there will be warriors like Wes Stauer who have the know-how and, once set in motion, the unstoppable professional drive, to see the bad guys to their graves and destroy every last earthly piece of their nasty legacies.

published September 2011

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

The Amazon Legion

Carrera Series

On the colony planet of Terra Nova, Carrera has achieved his revenge, destroying those who had destroyed his life by killing his wife and children in a terrorist strike. And, with this help of his second wife, he has thwarted an attempted coup that would have restored the rule of the oligarchy and undone his hard-won victory. But his fight is not over yet...

A legendary warrior is born: Carrera, the scourge of Salafism. He will forge an army from the decrepit remains of a military in a failing state. He will find those who killed his family. He will destroy them utterly. And he will try like hell to not become exactly like the enemy he is fighting.

The problem of the Tauran Union's control of the Transitway between Terra Nova and Earth remains, as does the problem of the nuclear armed United Earth Peace Fleet, orbiting above the planet. The Taurans will not leave, and the Balboans?a proud people, with much recent success in war - will not tolerate that they should remain.

And yet, with one hundred times the population and three or four hundred times the wealth, the Tauran Union outclasses little Balboa in almost every way, even without the support of Old Earth. Sadly, they have that support. Everything, everyone, will have to be used to finish the job of freeing the country and, if possible, the planet. The children must fight. The old must serve, too. And the women?

This is their story, the story of Balboa's Tercio Amazona, the Amazon Regiment.

published April 2011

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

Countdown: The Liberators

Countdown Series

Old soldiers never die... except inside, when they lack a reason to live. Old soldier Wes Stauer is dying inside, from sheer lack of purpose.

And then comes the knock on the door: "Our leader's son and heir has been kidnapped. We don't know where he is. We need you to get him back for us. The people who have him are numerous, warlike, and well armed. But money is no object."

And then old soldiers-sailors and airmen, too-stop fading away and come back into sharp focus.

published February 2011

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

The Lotus Eaters

Carrera Series

Sometimes paranoia is just a heightened state of awareness. Carrera's won his war, and inflicted a horrific revenge upon his enemies. But there are wars after wars. The Tauran Union is planning an attack. The criminals of neighboring states are already attacking, and threatening to embroil him in a war with the planet's premier power. His only living son is under fire among the windswept mountains of Pashtia. An enemy fleet is hunting his submarines. His organization has been infiltrated by spies. One of the two governments of his adopted country, Balboa, is trying to destroy everything he's built and reinstitute rule by a corrupt oligarchy. Worst of all, perhaps, he, himself, bearing a crushing burden of guilt, isn't quite the man he once was. Fortunately, the man he once was, was lucky enough to marry the right woman . . . . The Lotus Eaters is the direct sequel to A Desert Called Peace and Carnifex.

published April 2010

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

The Tuloriad

Legacy of the Aldenata, aka Posleen War books

Of the once innumerable battle clans of the Posleen only a handful survive. And that on the sufferance of a group of despised Indowy and Himmit. Plucked from the maelstrom on Earth they are cast out into the eternal blackness of the stars with only a slighltly insane Indowy and a computer virus to guide them.

What follows is a trail of tears and remembrance as the Posleen retrace the footsteps of their ancestors in a search for their homeworld. A search to determine if the Posleen posess the one thing no Human would give them credit for: A soul.

Returned to their beginnings, the question remains: Is there a new path for the Tular Posleen?

published October 2009, with John Ringo

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

Caliphate

Demography is destiny. In the 22nd century European deathbed demographics have turned the continent over to the more fertile Moslems. Atheism in Europe has been exterminated. Homosexuals are hanged, stoned or crucified. Such Christians as remain are relegated to dhimmitude, a form of second class citizenship. They are denied arms, denied civil rights, denied a voice, and specially taxed via the Koranic yizya. Their sons are taken as conscripted soldiers while their daughters are subject to the depredations of the continent's new masters.

In that world, Petra, a German girl sold into prostitution as a slave at the age of nine to pay her family's yizya, dreams of escape. Unlike most girls of the day, Petra can read. And in her only real possession, her grandmother's diary, a diary detailing the fall of European civilization, Petra has learned of a magic place across the sea: America.

published April 2008

Free eBook dowload, click here

Carnifex

Carrera Series

Revenge: it won't bring your wife and kids back, but it might help with the nightmares.

Patricio Carrera has been waging what amounts to a private world war to bring to justice the murderers of his family. He's raised an army and air force and used them. He's raised a fleet and he's about to use that. He's suborned one republic and is about to undermine another. He's tracked his enemies across half a world, breaking, in the process, any notion of international law that stood in his way.

Now he's deployed his legions to Pashtia, penultimate hideout of the Salafi Ikhwan who have made him what he has become. But with each step further from his home, revenge seems no closer. And with each step he leaves behind him a little of his dwindling humanity.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Yet the trail itself grows cold, as cold as the snow-capped, windswept mountains of Pashtia. Only Carrera's hate still burns hot, and that's a fire that is slowly consuming him.

published November 2007

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

A Desert Called Peace

Carrera Series

Columbia has consolidated power and risen against the oppression of Earth's corrupt Caliphate. But when Salafi madmen bent on a new jihad kill FSC Captain Patrick Hennessey's family in a cowardly attack, they create an enemy that will show even less mercy than they do.

A legendary warrior is born: Carrera, the scourge of Salafism. He will forge an army from the decrepit remains of a military in a failing state. He will find those who killed his family. He will destroy them utterly. And he will try like hell to not become exactly like the enemy he is fighting.

Only when he is finished will there be peace: the peace of an empty wind as it blows across a desert strewn with the bones of Carrera's enemies.

published September 2007

Free eBook dowload, click here

Yellow Eyes

Legacy of the Aldenata, aka Posleen War books

From Publishers Weekly

In this breathless page-turner, the latest in the Posleen military SF series from Ringo and Kratman (Watch on the Rhine), Latin America falls to the reptilian alien invaders without much struggle, except for Panama. There, members of the U.S. military enlist local forces and desperately resist. The terrain aids the defenders, as do the local flora and fauna, but it's the fighting men and women's brains and guts that make the real difference. Interestingly, the hideous, hungry Posleen, who are helplessly following their racial instincts, come across as more sympathetic than the cowardly traitors?i.e., diplomats and politicians?who obstruct the human warriors; the aliens get to die with more dignity. Characterization generally is exaggerated but vivid, and the battle tactics are worked out in satisfying detail. Readers who can forget the authors' right-wing politics and approach it all like a professional wrestling show will have fun.

(Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Earth invaded! The Posleen aggressors eating what population they don't outright vaporize! Now the aliens are closing in on a vital choke point for the humans: the Panama Canal. No canal, no food. No food the North American resistance crumbles, and hope fades. What's worse, slimeball appeasers within the U.S. State Department (surprise!) are set to sell out the resistance to another race of would-be galactic overlords.

One problem for our enemies: when the chips are down for humans, heroes have a habit of arising: A captain of industry who whips a corrupt and inefficient Central American kleptocracy into fighting shape within weeks. A retired Panamanian woman warrior who returns to the field of battle to rally her people in a last stand to save their children. And a battleship that is literally brought to consciousness by the echoes of ancient naval tradition (and a sentient A.I.) to fight ferociously for her country  and the captain she's come to love.

It's a rip-roaring epic of tactics, heroism, and survival as only two masters of military SF (both of whom served in Panama during their stint in the Army) can tell it.

published April 2007, with John Ringo

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

Watch on the Rhine

Legacy of the Aldenata, aka Posleen War books

In the dark days after the events in the book Gust Front, but before the primary invasion, the Chancellor of Germany faces a critical decision. Over the years, with military cutbacks, the store of experienced military personnel had simply dwindled. After the destruction of Northern Virginia, he realized that it was necessary to tap the one group he had sworn never, ever, to recall: the few remaining survivors of the Waffen SS. Watch On the Rhine is perhaps the most unbiased, and brutal, look at the inner workings of the Waffen SS in history. Meticulously researched, it explores all that was good, and evil, about the most infamous military force in history using the backdrop of the Posleen invasion as a canvas.

published August 2005, with John Ringo

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here

A State of Disobedience

In the long war against terrorism, the US Government had taken on extraordinary powers. And now that the war was won, powerful forces in the government had no intention of relinquishing those powers. As in 1860, the country was on the verge of civil war. And as in 1860, a leader arose to save the country but it was not the President this time. Instead, the Governor of Texas was the woman of destiny. And, though the Federal Government had more guns and troops, David was about to give Goliath a run for his money. . . .

published December 2003

To purchase at Baen, click here

To purchase at Amazon, click here