Jason Thanou has fought for the continued existence of humanity across the centuries. As a special operations officer of the Temporal Regulatory Authority, he's traveled though time to thwart the Transhumanists-genetically and mechanically enhanced beings that seek to destroy humanity-and their alien allies, the Teloi.
But for all his work, the Transhumanist Underground has never been defeated. In possession of the same time travel technology as the Temporal Regulatory Authority, the Transhumanists have been busy planting 'time bombs' throughout recorded history. Time bombs that are set to go off on The Day, when the secret history the Transhumanists have planted will be revealed, resulting in the overthrow of humanity.
Now, Jason Thanou, along with fellow TRA agents Alexandre Mondrago and Father Julian Casinde, must travel through Earth's bloody history to ensure the survival of the human race. They'll find themselves in Italy, two days before the death of Pope John Paul I. Father Casinde has reason to believe that something much more sinister than a simple heart attack is behind the death of the Holy Father.
Special operations officer Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority must once again plunge into Earth's blood-drenched past to combat the plots of the Transhumanist underground to subvert that past and create a secret history leading up to the fulfillment of their mad dream of transforming humanity into a race of gods and monsters.
Special operations officer Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority must once again plunge into Earth's blood-drenched past to combat the plots of the Transhumanist underground to subvert that past and create a secret history leading up to the fulfillment of their mad dream of transforming humanity into a race of gods and monsters.
The transhumanists are attempting to use the chaos of the American Civil War to escape the Observer Effect: the immutable law that recorded history cannot be changed. If any should attempt it, time has a way of dealing with those transgressors in a very brutal, very final fashion. Now it is the last days of the Confederacy, and the Fall of Richmond looms. In the Shenandoah Valley, in the region later known as Mosby's Confederacy, insurgency brews, and the time travelers must join the raiders to prevent a transhumanist trap from dooming the mission from the start.
Yet human freedom is ultimately on the line in both the past and the future, and the leader of a secret slave underground fighting for liberty possesses an incredible secret that may change Jason's fate-and that of the future itself-forever.
Special operations officer Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority must once again plunge into Old Earth's blood-drenched past to combat the plots of the Transhumanist underground to subvert that past and create a secret history leading up to the fulfillment of their mad dream of transforming humanity into a race of gods and monsters.
Jason and his companions travel to the seventeenth century to encounter the real pirates of the Caribbean-including a beautiful she-pirate who turns out to be Transhumanist renegade. To Jason's horror, he also learns that the Teloi aliens who were the grim reality behind the pagan pantheons of antiquity-aliens Jason believed he'd successfully destroyed-are still active, and aiding the Transhumanists in founding an unspeakable cult. What's more, these are a different-and far more dangerous-breed of Teloi than before.
Jason must somehow thwart the plans of the sinister allies while at the same time preventing reality itself from falling into chaos. In the end he finds himself venturing into space with a totally unexpected ally: Captain Henry Morgan.
The sequel to the time travel thriller Blood of the Heroes
Jason Thanou: a time traveler with a burning mission. When the gods of ancient Greece proved to be not only monstrously real, but totally alien-and poised to dominate humanity forever-Jason took care of the situation, at least in Minoan Crete. Now he's got what looks like a normal assignment: to lead a time traveling expedition of scholars to the battle of Marathon and record for the benefit of future historians the magnificent stand of Greece's hoplite warriors against Persian invaders.
But the Olympians are not done with their attempt to dominate humanity. Now the god Pan is afoot in Greece-a creature who may have the power to turn ancient Athens away from her budding democracy and toward a corrupt future on an Earth dominated by twisted humans and evil alien forces. But not if Jason can discover Pan's secret, thwart a conspiracy that stretches for millennia-and save the birthplace of democracy from the corruption of the gods.
A near-future Earth has shaken off the devastating colonization by alien Lokaran invaders and totalitarian rule by the alien's puppets, the Earth First party. But now Earth is flung into galactic intrigue and war. The Lokaron empire teeters on the edge of a fratricidal meltdown and a cabal of ancient enemies hope to use Earth as a proxy to destroy the empire and rule over a new Galactic dark age.
Now Captain Andrew Roark, the son of heroes of the rebellion and an officer trained in Lokaran space warfare tactics, joins with a highly capable Lokar who opposes the empire but wishes to see it transformed rather than destroyed. Together they must uncover a conspiracy to control Earth, and then obtain the secret key to defeating it. War for galactic control looms, and freedom for Earth-so recently escaped from under the boot-heel of one oppressor-is once again in the balance.
An Empire in Danger
The Empire is in danger, with a weak sybarite on the throne and rebellion rising in outlying regions of the Galaxy and on Earth itself. Then the Emperor is assassinated, and General Ivar Brady-Schiovana is forced to declare himself Emperor. But hope appears in the persons of two men and a woman who are rumored to be legendary heroes.
It wasn't much of an empire anymore-but it was all they had . . .
Afterwards, Basil Castellan was always certain that it had all begun the day he'd been rescued by the dragon. Oh, it hadn't been a real dragon, of course, or so he hastily assured everyone to whom he told the story. Only . . . it had been a real dragon. But he would never share that particular knowledge with anyone but Sonja and Tarval . . . The Empire had preserved peace and order throughout human-inhabited space, but it had grown weak with the passing of the centuries, and now the self styled New Humans were rising in open rebellion, striving to seize control and impose their fanatical grand design on all humans everywhere. Basil, Sonja, and Torval had only recently graduated from the Imperial Deep Space Fleet Academy, and the three comrades had no inkling of the crucial role they would play as the rising storm of war engulfed the galaxy-nor of the importance of the Luon, the dragon-like beings from Basil's homeworld, who were older, wiser, and more powerful than humans could imagine.
In our universe, Ponce de Leon is remembered for his fruitless search for the mythical fountain of youth. But, in an alternate universe, his quest found something very different-and very dangerous. After his return to Spain, bizarre rumors flew about what he had found there, and what had come back with him.
Eighty-five years later, Spain sent a fleet of ships against England. The English were confident that they could repel the threat-but England's fleet was annihilated by weapons shooting beams of fiery light, weapons which seemed to employ the blackest of sorcery, even if they were wielded by odd-looking beings in monk's garb.
The Queen herself was forced to flee to the New World on Captain Thomas Winslow's ship, Heron, accompanied by her advisor Dr. Dee, whom some called a sorcerer, and an odd fellow named Shakespeare, hoping there to find the source of Spain's powerful weapons. But they would find far stranger matters there than they had expected, such as a grown woman who had been only an infant a year before, and eerie tales of a gate to another world with beings who were not human . . .
Often hired by a secret government agency to do undercover work, Bob Devaney was escorting a mysterious woman named Novak to the White House when they were ambushed by gunmen. Novak used a device like an invisibility field to make an impossible escape-and then knocked Devaney out with some kind of ray-tube. When he woke up, Novak was about to terminate him for knowing too much, but a message arrived from a mysterious individual known as Mr. Inconnu: Devaney was to be recruited for something called the Prometheus Project.
The Project turned out to be the largest disinformation operation in history, targeted at the aliens who ruled the galaxy. Unless the Earth could convince the aliens that the planet had a unified government, armed with technology comparable to that of the galactic rulers, the Earth would be exploited as a primitive protectorate. So far the hoax was working, but someone in the Project was selling secrets to an interstellar mafia called the Tonkuztra about the real state of affairs on Earth. And Devaney knew that Chloe Bryant, the woman he had fallen in love with, was being set up to take a fall for the real traitor.
But matters would turn out to be even more complicated than that-and Devaney would discover the strange relationship between himself and the enigmatic Mr. Inconnu . . .
Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority had about had it with nursemaiding parties of ivory-tower academics through Earth's blood-drenched history, keeping them alive as they sought evidence for their pet theories. Of course, when one of the ivory-tower academics looked like Doctor Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez, one last expedition didn't look like such a bad idea after all . . .
Besides, there was something to be said for witnessing the Santorini explosion of 1628 BC-the most cataclysmic natural disaster of human history, and the source of much of the mythology of Jason's own Greek ancestors. But once Jason and his companions were in the Aegean Bronze Age, unable to return to their own twenty-fourth-century time until a predetermined instant, they would find that there was more to those old legends of gods and heroes than anyone had imagined. For the gods were very real-horribly so. And dealing with them took very real heroes.
THE ALIENS PLAYED BY THE RULES. THEIR RULES.
When the Lokaron suddenly appeared in the skies of Earth, America was enjoying victory in the off-and-on war that had occupied most of the twentieth century. That's why they chose America to occupy and use as their puppet in dominating the planet. We were already set up to do it; now we would do it for them.
Not that they were evil; they just insisted that we trade with them. By their rules, rules backed up by irresistible weapons. In terms of those rules, they would even play fair-but in the long run, if they didn't own something, it would be because they didn't want it.
At first we tried to fight, but just as the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindus and all the rest had learned, when the ones with the guns say 'Let's trade!' they really mean 'Trade or bleed.' And so you trade-even if you won't have a country-or a planet-left when the last round is played out.
But worms turn, and just as had the Europeans a century ago, the Lokaron were going to learn a lesson from their victims, a lesson that they weren't going to like one bit . . .
