by David Weber and Steve White

The Promised Land Has A Vermin Problem. . .

Once before, the sentient races in the known part of the galaxy had united against alien invaders. Decades have since passed and new generations have grown complacent . . . dangerously so.

Long ago, much of the population of an entire planet fled their world before its sun went nova in thousands of ships, each one larger than a city. Now, the armada has arrived at the world they intend to make their new home. They regard the fact that the planet is already colonized by humans as a mere inconvenience, and their mode of communication is so different from anything humans use that they do not consider humans and their allies to be truly intelligent.

This time, the races of the old alliance will not have to worry about becoming an invader's meal— but that will be small comfort if these new invaders decide that genocide is justified for their own survival. . . .

Steve White, co-author with David Weber of the New York Times best-seller The Shiva Option, joins with Charles E. Gannon to carve another notch in the Starfire adventure saga. A resurrected star navy hero attempts to keep a fragile interstellar alliance together while battling an implacable alien adversary.

Steve White, Vietnam vet, long-time David Weber collaborator and co-author, with Weber, of the New York Times best-seller The Shiva Option, joins with Analog contributor and military SF scholar Charles E. Gannon to carve another notch in the Starfire adventure saga.

An implacable foe with telepathic cohesion in battle, near-immortality, and eons-advanced engineering skills threatens to wipe humanity from the galaxy. What’s more, they’ve overcome their one weakness–no faster-than-light travel–and have followed humanity through our star gates and beyond. But humans are the master of adaption, and have got a counterpunch of devastating proportions in reserve. Now a hard-bitten and brilliant admiral must face down renewed alien attack and somehow communicate to the enemy that if he is forced to use his ultimate military option, galactic civilization itself may come to a fiery end.

ORIGINAL TRADE PAPERACK. Steve White, co-author with David Weber of the New York Times best-seller The Shiva Option, joins with Compton Crook Award Winner Charles E. Gannon to carve another notch in the Starfire adventure saga.

The war with the Arduans—profoundly alien invaders who originally arrived in STL ships—is over. Most of those attackers are now probationary (and very productive) citizens of the Rim Federation.

However, many among the Arduans' warrior caste have neither accepted defeat, nor the personhood of any of the other intelligence races. Their leader, the ruthless admiral of the second Arduan exodus—Amunsit—is in firm control of the Zarzuela system. Along with a fifth column among the peaceable Arduans, she hopes to find allies in subsequent refugee fleets that abandoned their race's now-dead home system long ago.

But as the victors' diplomats attempt to soothe tensions with these warlike neighbors, two heroes of the last war—veteran Admiral Ian Trevayne and young trouble-shooter Ossian Wethermere—suspect they have stumbled upon a deeper Arduan plot: one which could shatter the Pan-Sentient Union, and perhaps interstellar civilization itself.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

In the end, the only political systems that seem to work are those based on freedom. The Inner World leaders of the Terran Federation seem to have forgotten this simple truth. After fighting the Khanate—with the Fringe Worlds to supply the raw material and the fighting men—the Inner Worlds found it hard to give up the powers they had seized during the war. So they decided not to—rather than allow the rapidly expanding Fringe Worlds representation in the Federation, they are inviting the Khanate in, to keep the colonial upstarts in their place. The Fringers have only one answer to that:

INSURRECTION

WHITE AND GANNON RETURN WITH A NEW ENTRY IN THE STARFIRE SERIES, co-created by New York Times best-selling authors Steve White and David Weber.

STAND AGAINST THE ALIEN INVADER APOCALYPSE!

The war with the profoundly alien Arduans has ended, and the Arduans have come to call humanity their allies. Most of them—the Arduan warrior caste refuses to accept defeat. Now known as the Kaituni, they are waging a war of extermination against all members of the pan-Sentient Union, human and Arduan alike. What’s more, the Kaituni have an unexpected weapon in their arsenal: the alien Arachnids, once thought driven to extinction. The Kaituni drive the Arachnid fleet ahead of them, inflicting untold damage.

The war has been marked by retreat on the side of the pan-Sentient Union. It seems the best they can do is minimize their losses. But now the Arachnids and the Kaituni are at the doorstep to the Heart Worlds, Sol, and Earth: Alpha Centauri. The odds look bleak. But Admiral Ian Trevayne and Commodore Ossian Wethermere have faced down long odds in the past. It’s time to take a stand, for Earth, for humanity . . . and for the pan-Sentient Union!

DEFEAT WAS NOT AN OPTION

The war wasn't going well.

The mind-numbingly alien Arachnids were an enemy whose like no civilized race had ever confronted. Like some carnivorous cancer, the "Bugs" had overrun planet after planet . . . and they regarded any competing sentient species as only one more protein source. They couldn't be reasoned with, or even talked to, because no one had the least idea of how to communicate with a telepathic species with no recognizable language . . . and whose response to any communication attempt was a missile salvo. No one knew how large their civilization—if it could be called a "civilization"—actually was, or how it was organized, but the huge fleets they threw against their opponents suggested that it was enormous.

The Grand Alliance of Humans, Orions, Ophiuchi, and Gorm, united in desperate self-defense, have been driven to the wall. Billions of their civilians have been slaughtered. Their most powerful offensive operation has ended in shattering defeat and the deaths of their most experienced and revered military commanders. The edge in technology with which they began the war is eroding out from under them and whatever they do, the Bugs just keep coming.

But the warriors of the Grand Alliance know what stands behind them and they will surrender no more civilians to the oncoming juggernaut. They will die first . . . and they will also reactivate General Directive 18, however horrible it may be. Because when the only possible outcomes are victory or racial extermination, only one option is acceptable.

The Shiva Option

TWO NOVELS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
BEST-SELLING SERIES IN ONE VOLUME

Crusade:

Spacers call the warp point Charon's Ferry.

No star ship has ever entered it and returned since a vengeful Orion task force pursued a doomed Terran colonization fleet into it in 2206.

Almost a century has passed. The fiery hatreds of a quarter-century of warfare between the Terran Federation and the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaieeee, the cat-like species humans called the "Orions," have eased at least a little. The "Grand Alliance" forged by the need to fight side-by-side against the genocidal Rigelians remains, but there are those on either side who continue to hate, continue to distrust.

Now the strength of that war-forged alliance is about to be tested. For Charon's Ferry is about to give up the secret of its dead. A ship has emerged from the deadly warp point at last. A ship which responds to the challenge of an Orion star ship using ancient human communications codes . . . then opens fire.

The holocaust of interstellar warfare has been ignited anew, in a bloody crusade to free Holy Mother Terra.

In Death Ground:

In difficult ground, press on;
In encircled ground, devise stratagems;
In death ground, fight.

—Sun Tzu in The Art of War (circa 400 B.C.)

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Three thousand years after Sun Tszu wrote those words, in the time of the Fourth Interstellar War, the ancient advice still holds true.

The "Bugs" have overwhelming numbers, implacable purpose, and a strategy that's mind-numbingly alien. They can't be reasoned or negotiated with. They can't even be communicated with. But what they want is terrifyingly clear. The sentient species in their path aren't enemies to be conquered; they're food sources to be consumed.

Totally oblivious to their own losses, rumbling onward like some invincible force of nature, their enormous fleets are as unstoppable as Juggernaut. Yet for the desperate Federation Navy and its enemies-turned-allies, the Orions, there is nowhere to go. Their battered, outnumbered ships are all that stand between the billions upon billions of defenseless civilians on the worlds behind them and an enemy from the darkest depths of nightmare, and there can be no retreat. But at least their options are clear.

As Sun Tzu said, in death ground, there is only one strategy:

FIGHT.