Portal Wars
Gehenna Dawn
Portal Wars I
Erastus. An unimaginable nightmare. A searing hot world, covered with cracked, burning deserts and sweltering jungles. A hostile planet far from Earth, it was the most hellish place men have ever tried to survive. Called Gehenna by the condemned men sent to fight there, it forged the few who survived its murderous battles into the strongest soldiers in history.
Jake Taylor was a New Hampshire farmboy who wanted nothing more than to marry his girlfriend, work on the farm, and maybe one day write a great novel. But mankind was fighting the alien Tegeri and their bio-mechanical cyborg soldiers, and UN Central needed men…men to go to war on hostile worlds like Erastus.
Jake wasn’t given a choice, not a real one. He found himself torn from home and family, conscripted for life and shipped to Erastus to take his place in the battle lines, never to return. In this alien hell, Taylor and his cybernetically-enhanced comrades fight their never-ending war against the servants of the Tegeri, the manufactured soldiers they call simply, the Machines.
Jake survives battle after battle, rising steadily through the ranks, giving all to the desperate fight to save Earth. But endless combat in hell carries a cost, and Taylor can feel himself losing what little is left of his spirit, his humanity. When he finally discovers a terrible secret…that everything he’d believed, all he’d fought for his entire life, was nothing but a monstrous lie, he must decide who is the real enemy, and how far he is willing to go to right a horrific wrong.
And if he does what he must to prevail against overwhelming odds and win the final victory, will he be able to control the growing madness inside…or will he be become the very thing he has sworn to destroy?
The Ten Thousand
Portal Wars II
General Jake Taylor and his army of cyborg soldiers are veterans of Erastus, a planet so brutal, so hellish, it is called Gehenna by the men sent to fight and die there. He and his comrades battled for years in the most appalling conditions human beings have ever endured, believing the entire time they were protecting Earth from bloodthirsty alien monsters. But it was all a lie, the cynical propaganda of the totalitarian regime that rules over all mankind.
The alien Tegeri, and their bio-mechanical soldiers Taylor’s men call the Machines, were the victims, targeted by a regime that needed an enemy to consolidate its absolute rule over mankind. For decades, men like Taylor and his soldiers were the aggressors, unwittingly fighting an unjust war. But when the Tegeri chose Taylor as their contact and finally told him the horrible truth, he rallied the veterans of Erastus for a new battle, one to free Earth from its self-appointed masters.
Taylor’s soldiers begin the long campaign back to Earth, toward a reckoning with the brutal government they are sworn to destroy. The heart of this force is the Ten Thousand, surgically-altered Supersoldiers, products of an experimental enhancement program, and the first of their kind. But they are not the last, and on the planet Juno they will meet their counterparts, the Black Corps, a force created by Earth’s government specifically to destroy them. The Black Corps outnumbers Taylor’s soldiers 2-1, and they have a vast advantage in supply and logistical support. But Taylor’s men are veterans of the furnace of Gehenna, and they don’t die easily.
But there is more at stake than the freedom of humanity, greater consequences to their fight than even Taylor can imagine. For there is another alien race, one shrouded in legend and myth, known to the Tegeri only as the Darkness. Long ago the Darkness made war on the Ancients, the mighty beings that built the interstellar Portals. The Ancients are remembered in Tegeri lore as wise and powerful…almost as gods. But they fell ages past, destroyed utterly by the Darkness.
Now that great evil is returning, and this time it will destroy not only mankind and the Tegeri, but all the fledgling races the Ancients planted, hundreds of young sentient species, only now grasping for civilization.
The Ancients long ago foretold that an alliance of men and Tegeri would stand and defeat the Darkness and save the galaxy from destruction. But if this prophecy is to come to pass, Taylor and his men must destroy Earth’s totalitarian government and bring the dark truth to mankind, that there is another war to fight, one vaster and more terrible than any in human history or legend.
Homefront
Portal Wars III
The stunning conclusion to the Portal Wars trilogy…
Jake Taylor and his cyborg soldiers have fought their way from one Portal planet to another, moving steadily homeward with one thought in mind. The utter destruction of the corrupt rulers who sent them to hell to fight and die as pawns in a dishonest war, one started not by the alien enemy, but by Earth’s own UNGov, as a tool in it plot to seize total power.
And now, after the fighting, the suffering, the bitter losses…finally, it is time. Time for the final invasion of Earth. Time to liberate their homeland from the totalitarian government that controls it utterly, to find those responsible for all that has happened…and to kill them all.
Jake and his warriors are hopelessly outnumbered, but they are determined to battle to the last, to sacrifice all for any hope of victory, however small. But Taylor and his soldiers are not alone in their fight, for in Earth’s shadows, in the rotting slums and the remote countryside, in dark corners and crumbling cellars, a spark of defiance has survived and grown, men and women who remember liberty, and are willing to die for the chance to regain what they lost a generation before. They are preparing…and waiting. Waiting for the chance to strike a blow for freedom.
But those who cling to power will not give it up easily. Indeed, the politicians who run UNGov will see Earth a charred ruin, the dead lying in unburied heaps before they will yield their positions. The battle is about to begin…and it cannot end until only one side remains.
Is Jake Taylor willing to go all the way, to fight to the end, do what he must…to accept nothing less than death or victory, whatever the cost?