Legacy Universe

APEX SOLDIER is the first book in the new Legacy Universe series, The Apex Soldier Sequence. It will be available for Amazon Kindle on Monday 30th July, but you can read the exciting prologue here, right now!

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A world at war. A nation at risk. But one man may be the key to a new tomorrow. APEX SOLDIER.

Out among the stars of known space, on distant Pura, women rule. Stronger, faster, and smarter, females govern all aspects of puran society, while the weaker males serve out domestic lives without ambition. Love is anything but universal.

Now, amid economic and political turmoil, scientists of the Ansan Bodily Enhancement Cluster are preparing to push forward their plans to create physically equal men. They are ready to genetically engineer the first Apex Soldiers. They are ready to send men on to the battlefields that rage all across Pura. They are ready to guarantee the economic survival of their country.

Kandal Gothran, driven to the Apex Soldier programme from the depths of his own personal tragedy, seeks redemption in the fires of battle. Can he succeed in the face of treachery and political subterfuge? Or will the programme’s failure doom a nation?

LEGACY UNIVERSE – A WHOLE NEW UNIVERSE OF SCIENCE FICTION

Apex Soldier is the first full-length novel in the The Apex Soldier Sequence trilogy and is set within the Legacy Universe.

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Prologue

Calthera found herself sprinting, chased by the thunderous booms of bombing rounds fired across the Front. The explosions were not on her heels. Instead, they were outside the mobile facility, crashing all around while she dashed, searching for answers. Cursing, she was desperately trying to position all of the troops outside, hoping to keep some of them, as many as she could, alive. The platoon had been ambushed as it moved along the Front, encountering a barricade of Maltrastan military equipment too far away to see, but close enough to fire upon them.

“We’d need a hundred more armoured vehicles to get across the Front with enough women to sabotage those vehicles. Even then we’d likely lack the infantry!”

“We never have enough infantry!” Calthera barked in reply to the resource co-ordinator, who was speaking but doing very little else. “There aren’t enough women born in Referi to end this stupid conflict. There’s just enough to keep it going. That’s all we do! We fuel the fires and everybody else tries to pretend that this isn’t happening. We’re stuck here!”

“This is hardly the time!” replied the commanding officer within the facility.

Silenced, Calthera returned to the work she had hastily assembled. She was searching panel screens which glittered, marking out the nearby barren terrain, refusing the numerous suggested routes of retreat or attack as all too costly.

“We can’t do this without losing most of our people. There’s nowhere to go that isn’t within range.”

Her commander was enraged. “It won’t be long until the mobile units are all hit! The shots will take out anybody hiding beneath their wings. You are running out of time Calthera Yanni. Either you give me a route, or I order a frontal attack!”

Calthera slammed her fists down onto the panels, screaming openly into the air. There was nothing she could offer that wasn’t likely to cause the same loss of life.

“Wait!” she said, her eyes darting down to one of the panels which had escaped her wrath. “I think I have it!”

As her last word was spoken, the thunder caught up with Calthera. A shell, fired by a distant soldier pressing a distant button, flew through the sky, whistling gleefully as it followed its path. It broke through the black smoke of the battlefield, then into the brighter, white clouds above, before arcing back down. The shell cut the white and the black, and then through the crackling fragments of fire rising from the ground. It landed next to the mobile facility that housed Calthera, flipping it up into the air.

She was not awake to feel her stomach churn as the facility was thrown up onto a high mound.

Her consciousness was only regained when her commander shook her awake. Many of the lights within the facility were out, and others were flickering. They played against the screens of the sparkling panels scattered amongst other debris. Calthera felt numb, yet expected pain after a first glance at the scene around her.

“I… I…”

“Now, there’s no need to speak,” said the commander. Her harsh, haggard face, long since robbed of its youthful beauty by war, was smeared filthy with black soot and the evidence of burns.

“I… want Kandal,” Calthera said, struggling. To say his name brought her some happiness and good memories. It was enough for her to try and push her body up, but the sight of a long, twisted piece of shrapnel through her gut stalled the attempt.

“Kandal? He’s your partner? There are no men here, Calthera.”

“Why? Why can’t we have them here?”

“Because that’s not how our world works,” replied her commander, running a hand across Calthera’s face to try and comfort. “They couldn’t stop this happening.”

“I wanted to bring him with me. He would have liked it, except for the bad parts.”

This caused the commander to laugh. “And what are the good parts?”

“We might have had some if he had been here,” Calthera said, letting herself smile.

“He wouldn’t have lasted long, dear Calthera. Too weak. They all are.”

Calthera’s smile transformed from weak grin into a beaming, toothy glow.

“You know, commander, I think I’ll get my way. I think that’s all about to change. Women will be able to bring their men to these battlefields. We won’t have to die without them.”

“If you say so, Calthera. If you say so.”

The commanders words were too late coming. Calthera was dead.

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APEX SOLDIER, Book One in The Apex Soldier Sequence, will release on July 30th 2012. Check back here on Monday for links to the Amazon book pages!