Battlegroup - Paperback

by T. Jackson King (Author)

Jacob Renselaer and his fleet of eight starships are all that stand between a new attack by wasp-like aliens and the survival of the Kepler 10 colony world. His girlfriend Daisy helps as the new XO, while Jacob relies on a grizzled Marine to educate him in the ways of war. Jacob sends the Marines to attack a wasp ship. While the raid succeeds, things turn upside down when the relief fleet arrives from Earth, led by an admiral who takes overall command. Then a wasp attack fleet of 36 deadly ships shows up. Can humans defeat this giant fleet? Can they survive the artificial black holes created by the wasps? If they can't, 71,000 colonists will die. Jacob's ship will die. And any hope to stop humanity's first interstellar war will also die. Jacob must do what he never thought he could. He must lead his ship and his people and be the daring hero his father raised him to be.

Author Biography

T. Jackson King (Tom) is a professional archaeologist and journalist. He writes hard science fiction, anthropological SciFi, dark fantasy/horror and contemporary fantasy/magic realism--but that didn't happen until he was 38. Before then, college years spent in Paris and in Tokyo led Tom into antiwar activism, hanging out with some Japanese hippies and learning how often governments lie to their citizens. The latter lesson led him and a college buddy to publish the Shinjuku Sutra English language underground tabloid in Japan in 1967. That was followed by helping shut down the University of Tennessee at Knoxville campus in 1968 and a bus trip to Washington D.C. for the Second March on Washington where thousands demanded an end to the Vietnam War. Temporary sanity returned when Tom worked in a radiocarbon lab at UC Riverside and earned an MA degree in Archaeology from UCLA. His interests in ancient history, ancient cultures and journalism got him several government agency jobs that paid the bills, led him to roam the raw landscape of the Western United States, and helped him and his wife Leslee raise three kids. A funny thing happened on the way to normality. By the time he was 38 and doing federal arky work in Colorado, Tom's first novel FIRST CONTACT was a stage play in his head that wouldn't go away. So he wrote it down. It got rejected. His next novel was published as RETREAD SHOP (Warner Books, 1988). It was off to the writing races and Tom's many voyages of imaginative discovery have led to 24 published novels, a book of poetry, and a conviction that when Humans reach the stars, we will find them crowded with space-going Aliens. We will be the New Kids On The Block! This theme appears in much of Tom's short fiction and novel writing. Tom lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA and hangs with a group of smart and tolerant Westerners. Divorce has taught him to smile a lot and to work at being a Nice Guy. Still, he is pretty weird. Has been since fourth grade when he began reading SciFi. Since then, he and Authority have rarely been in agreement. Readers are welcome to visit his T. Jackson King Facebook page. If you Friend him you will get the latest news on his writing efforts! Also, Tom's Twitter handle is @TJacksonKing. Reviews of his novels, interviews and news of upcoming novels can be found at his author page on http: //www.tjacksonking.com/.