Pulsar, a gargantuan colonial freighter, is outbound for earth from Aquea, an oceanic Earth colony that’s the 4th planet of Alpha Centauri A. Propelled by thermonuclear explosions and fueled by enormous ram scoops burning free hydrogen gathered in open space, its top speed is about eight tenths the speed of light.

The Pulsar was gone a mere 3 weeks when an interstellar wormhole forms near Aquea and from it appears a huge alien ship. The Vaptons, crustaceans the size of killer whales, are returning to collect their unintelligent young, later to raise them into full sentience. They find their pristine brood planet invaded by soft, disgusting aliens who are eating their young. Enraged, they nuke New Atlantis, the colonial city on Aquea, and then lay chase on the unknowing Pulsar.

Pulsar is taken completely off guard by two Vapton missiles tunneling in from astern and hidden by the expanding exhaust corona. Once in range, the first Vapton missile explodes triggering the second and Pulsar is peeled open like a gigantic can of beans with entire sections of her stern vaporized. Hammered from within and without by these expanding, nuclear shock waves, girders buckle, airlocks rupture, steel screams and collapses, corridors become resplendent arteries of nuclear fire and her precious human cargo die by the tens of thousands.

In a desperate race for survival the remaining survivors, lead by the highest ranking officer left alive--Ship’s Astrogator Toomey, decide to detach one of the 10 kilometer engine pods and use it as a lifeboat. They need to salvage and re-sequence the hydrogen nuclear pulse systems and find the ‘Bates machine’ to counter the now brutal bursts of acceleration. Suzy, ship’s computer programmer, and her rag-tag team set out to seek the experimental Bates machine, said to be a gravity wave generator. The Bates machine and its own compsym named Herkimer have survived, but the compsym has had its safeties removed and is now a rogue and not only will it not give up the data they need, it begins to ravage poor Suzy.

Meanwhile, Compro, Pulsars’s battle compsym, salvaged from the attack, activates the Pulsar's defenses and fires active, homing Wolf Missiles back at the Vaptons, severely crippling their alien ship and turning them away—if only temporarily. Compro's long range sensors then discover that the demolished Pulsar is falling into a maser, an organic molecular nebula, called the Proxima Centauri Fuel Reefs. Time is not on their side as they fall into this interstellar microwave oven.

Toomey discovers that Andrew Yates, a psychotic child molester dubbed the Helix Killer, has survived the attack and is being kept alive by the semi-sentient Mark II Dreadnought, an ancient, outlawed weapons platform programmed to take control when the operator is dying. The Mark II, totally ambivalent to its dying occupant, transforms into a berserker, killing all forms of life without prejudice.

This is a ripping, hard hitting, action yarn where the setting is revealed only as the story goes. The action is fast and furious and yet, there is touching human drama where heroes abound in spite of aliens, dark deeds and reprehensible villains. Read on, you will be well entertained.


About the Author:

Dateline April 2009 -> Robert Holland graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Colorado with a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems. He has been an Oracle Master Database Administrator throughout his entire professional career and ran his own professional consultancy before serving as Director of Information Services for the sheriff’s association in Colorado. Robert now writes full time and has written a number of science fiction short stories which he is currently combining into a new and, as yet, unpublished anthology. He has been [and still is] a musician, artist, master craftsman and song writer in parallel with his professional business career for his entire adult life.