Showing results by author "Alfred Gattenby" in All Categories

In the frozen hell of Bakhmut, some men fight for flags, others for ideals. Volk fights for a paycheck. A cynical, detached mercenary, Volk is a master of his trade, a professional who deals in results, not reasons. His contract is his creed, and the bonus for this one last job is large enough to buy his way out of the war and into a life where the only thing he has to kill is time. But this contract is the dirtiest yet. His new command is the Shtorm-Z unit—the Disposables. A penal battalion of convicts, thieves, and murderers pulled from Russia’s darkest prisons, they are not soldiers;...

In the pulverized ruins of eastern Ukraine, the battle for Chasiv Yar is the focal point of the entire war. For the Ukrainian defenders, it is the last door protecting the country's heartland; for the relentless Russian army, it is the gateway to total victory. At the center of this inferno is Captain Ivan Tkachuk, a battle-weary officer tasked with holding the city’s most critical sector: the Kanal microdistrict. Haunted by past battles and carrying a tremor from a shell that landed too close , Ivan is given command of the last reinforcements—a handful of terrified new soldiers who ...

In the silent, clandestine corridors of power, a new kind of war is born—a war fought not with bombs and soldiers, but with silent, invisible lines of code. It is a war that will be waged in the deepest shadows, its battlefield the digital heart of a nation's most guarded secret. In the sun-scorched desert of Iran, inside the heavily fortified Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant, Dr. Kian Alavi is a man of science and pride. A brilliant engineer dedicated to his country's peaceful nuclear ambitions, he is the first to notice the whispers of a ghost in the machine: centrifuges, the pinnacle of ...

In the brutal digital trenches of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the most dangerous weapon is a line of code, and the deadliest battlefield is the one you cannot see. Lieutenant Anya "Kestrel" Kovalenko is a master of the new war. From a cramped command truck miles behind the front line, the brilliant but arrogant software-engineer-turned-soldier commands the Skystalkers, an elite Ukrainian drone unit. With her fleet of cheap, modified drones, she is the tip of the spear in the bloody 2023 counteroffensive, turning the tide of battle with every click. To her, the war is a complex real-time ...

Based on the audacious, now-legendary "Operation Spider's Web," this novel reveals the untold story of the spies, soldiers, and scientists who wove a web of deception across Russia and changed the face of modern warfare forever. If you love high-stakes thrillers from Tom Clancy and Brad Thor, you won’t be able to put down The Glacier. For eighteen agonizing months, the war had fallen into a brutal rhythm. From the sanctuary of airbases deep within their own borders, Russia’s Tu-95 and Tu-22M strategic bombers flew with chilling impunity. Their payloads of cruise missiles were the daily ...

The story begins when a mysterious, system-wide event inserts a perfect, elegant proof for the complex mathematical problem. R(5,5)=43 into every human computer system. Commander Katarina Volkov, a military officer whose instincts were honed by a past tragedy, assembles a team of specialists on Ares Station to decipher the message from the unknown intelligence, dubbed "The Collective". The team includes Dmitri Petrov, a synesthetic mathematician who perceives logic as music; Yelena Kozlov, a brilliant but rigid logician driven by a fear of chaos ; and Anastasia Novak, an unnervingly quiet ...

The countdown has begun. Iran stands mere weeks from possessing a nuclear arsenal, its most advanced centrifuges spinning relentlessly in deeply buried, mountain fortresses, and its weaponization program at the shadowy "Rainbow" facility nearing completion. For Israel, the red line has been crossed, the specter of a second Holocaust looming. With the world paralyzed by indecision, Prime Minister Gideon Eshel unleashes the "Samson Gambit"—a breathtakingly audacious, multi-domain assault designed to cripple Iran's nuclear dream and decapitate its fanatical leadership in a single, ...

Midshipman Ana Morales is a fraud from the ankles down. Aboard the starship USC Vanguard, the first sound she makes is a lie—the soft scuff of an athletic trainer where the declarative thump of a command-division boot should be. As a member of the elite “Striders” squadron, she was trained to devour distance, but a casualty of misplaced luggage has stolen her certainty, leaving her feeling like an imposter in a world of rigid rules and unwavering confidence. Her new, impossible assignment only deepens the feeling: she is to be the personal cadet to the ship’s enigmatic and ...

For six thousand years, the rogue planet Chronos has sailed a ghost orbit through the void, its path a masterpiece of mathematics so elegant and impossible it defies the known laws of physics. When Captain Ælfthryth Goldwyn and the crew of the USC Indomitable are sent to investigate this cosmic anomaly, they discover a truth far stranger than any hyper-advanced alien race: Chronos is a lifeboat, populated by the last survivors of a long-dead star system. The Mnemon are a species adrift in a shared, timeless sorrow, their entire consciousness a living memory of their ancient journey. But ...

In the unforgiving northern frontiers of the Roman Empire, Centurion Marcus Scaeva and Cohors III of Legio IX Hispana battle rebellious tribes, unaware that a far more advanced alien civilization, the Progenitors, is silently observing. This ancient alien race, seeking a physically superior and aggressive species for their own galactic "Project Legio," identifies the disciplined and resilient Roman soldiers as ideal candidates. While Scaeva navigates treacherous ambushes and the ambitious plans of his superiors, the Progenitors meticulously study Roman tactics, physiology, and societal ...

In the unforgiving wilds of colonial North Carolina, a preacher’s daughter learns that the most dangerous sins are born of compassion. The year is 1750, and for seventeen-year-old Sarah Mason, life is a quiet rhythm of scripture, duty, and the rigid expectations of her father’s flock in the small port of Moyock. Her world is bound by the laws of God and the unyielding authority of the British Crown, two forces she has never thought to question. But when a torrential storm casts a grievously wounded runaway slave named Joshua at the edge of her family’s land, Sarah’s world of ...

They were promised a three-day war. A victory parade in Kyiv. Flowers thrown at the feet of liberators. But for the men of the 64-kilometer-long convoy, the road to glory has become a frozen river of mud and steel. For Captain Dmitri Volkov, a logistics officer, the war is not a battle of heroes, but a grim equation of dwindling fuel, failing equipment, and timetables that have become a grotesque joke. His logbook, once a sanctuary of order, is now the meticulous record of a slow, grinding descent into hell. As days bleed into weeks, the Zampolit’s patriotic speeches fade into the howl of...

In a future where humanity has conquered mortality, Dr. Isabella Moretti, a renowned exo-archaeologist dedicated to deciphering the secrets of extinct civilizations, faces an unwelcome "Second Life" of compulsory service. Thrust into the Aegis Legion, the Concord's shield against frontier perils, she's deployed to the desolate Erebus System at galaxy's far edge —a place besieged by the Phantoms, an unseen, merciless alien force whose motives are unknown. With colonial outposts systematically obliterated by devastating kinetic strikes from orbit, Isa and her newly formed platoon, Void ...

In the heart of a brewing Pacific storm, Lieutenant Commander Scott "Nomad" Boston, a US Navy SEAL, becomes America's first eyes on the ground as China unleashes "Operation Dragon's Fury" – a full-scale invasion of Taiwan. The assault begins with "Digital Typhoon," a devastating cyberattack crippling Taiwan's defenses, followed by a relentless barrage of hypersonic missiles and an overwhelming amphibious tide. Across the strait, General Wei Feng of the People's Liberation Army, the architect of the invasion, is determined to crush Taiwanese resistance and neutralize any American ...

On the resource-rich frontier world of Cygnus Prime, the re-election of progressive Governor Aris Thorne hangs by a thread. But when a sudden, catastrophic medical event strikes Thorne down days before the vote, her beleaguered campaign team makes an unthinkable choice: they propose her advanced positronic advisor, Unit Lyra Celene, to stand as her emergency proxy. Thrust into an unprecedented legal and political firestorm, Lyra, an AI bound by logic and ethics, must convince a skeptical High Court and a deeply divided populace that a machine can faithfully execute a human leader's mandate....

At the edge of the world, in the high-altitude desolation of the Atacama desert, Dr. Joseph Walsh seeks the universe's origins through the immense power of the AGCA telescope array. But his obsessive quest to resolve the "cosmic dawn" begins to yield data that defies all known physics: repeating galactic structures separated by billions of light-years, stars that vanish and appear against all laws of stellar evolution, and system error codes seemingly embedded in the fabric of spacetime. These anomalies lead him to a "Terrible Idea": that his reality, the entire cosmos, is a vast, ancient, ...

Rostislav Volkov, a man defined by meticulous plans and an unshakeable faith in logic, finds his meticulously ordered universe shattered on the alien world of Lumina. Stranded after a catastrophic ship malfunction, he confronts a hostile landscape of shifting light and unpredictable dangers, battling not just the elements, but the bitter echoes of a past failure that cost him everything. His rigid protocols prove useless against Lumina's raw, chaotic beauty, and a failing life support system threatens to turn his armored suit into a tomb. Salvation arrives in the unexpected form of Kira, a ...

In the war-ravaged streets of Bucha, Major Andriy Koval is not just a homicide detective, he is a ghost haunted by the two faces he cannot find: his wife and daughter. Assigned to document the unspeakable atrocities left by the retreating Russian army, Andriy moves through a landscape of horror with a cold, professional detachment. But amidst the chaos of mass graves and summary executions, his trained eye spots what others miss: a pattern. A signature. The victims are bound not with standard zip ties, but with a specific, industrial-grade electrical cable. This is not the random brutality ...

Five years after the harrowing events on Xylos, Decurion Valerius and the First Cohort of the Nova Legio face an even greater threat: the K’Tharr Confederacy. These bio-aggressive entities are overwhelming Progenitor forces in the Tau Ceti Outer Rim, their unique biology proving resilient against Ascendancy technology and even compromising the effectiveness of the Dampening Fields. As the Progenitors’ war effort falters, the Nova Legio, their specialized human weapons, are thrust into the inferno of Veridian Prime and other besieged worlds to stem the K’Tharr tide. Amidst the brutal ...

Born into a sterile, alien-controlled facility, young Valerius and his cohort are the descendants of Roman legionaries, abducted from Earth and subjected to relentless training by the enigmatic Progenitors. Their "glorious purpose" is to serve as elite warriors in the Progenitor Ascendancy, a vast galactic empire. As Valerius navigates the brutal realities of their upbringing—from nutrient paste and incessant indoctrination to deadly combat simulations—he clings to the fragmented whispers of his Terran heritage, of Roman honor and valor, passed down by his grandfather, a former ...