Only a Gigantic Hoax Kept the Earth from Being Taken Over by Aliens—but the Secret was About to be Leaked by a Traitor in THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT

Bob Devaney was a soldier in the Special Forces in the early 1960s until a traumatic event which he refused to discuss caused him to leave, setting up his own security and investigative agency, with one employee: himself.

Often hired by a secret government agency to do undercover work, he 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. Mr. Inconnu had arrived in a damaged but highly advanced craft in the 1940s with the information that he had escaped from a group of humans whom aliens had been studying. And 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—and the technology which Mr. Inconnu had brought with him helped—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, who was about to embark on a treason beyond imagination, whose consequences could jeopardize the universe itself.

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. . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve White was an officer in Naval Intelligence, and served in the Mediterranean and the Vietnam War Zone. Among the popular science fiction adventure novels he has written for Baen are the trilogy comprising The Disinherited, Legacy and Debt of Ages, which combine fast-paced space opera with Arthurian mythology. He has also written the galaxy-spanning adventure Prince of Sunset, and its sequel Emperor of Dawn, and the SF suspense thriller Eagle Against the Stars. With David Weber, he has written the Starfire series, the latest of which was the New York Times best seller The Shiva Option. His most recent novel is Forge of the Titans. He currently works for a legal publishing company in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is married and has three daughters.