USS Crusader

Retired (again) from the U.S. Space Navy and settling into ranch life with Captain Gail Pristy—the woman he loves—Quintos thought his war-fighting days were behind him. Then Admiral Gilbert called in an old debt, and suddenly he's back aboard USS Crusader—once the most powerful omninought in the fleet, now stripped down and converted into a glorified luxury liner for wealthy colonists.

But the mission to escort passengers to a newly terraformed world goes sideways the moment a group of massive warships appear at the wormhole exit. Ships that shouldn't exist. Ships belonging to the Sheentah—an alien species everyone believed went extinct three centuries ago.

They didn't go extinct. They went into hiding. And they've been waiting. For three hundred years, the Sheentah have been baiting traps across the galaxy, luring unsuspecting colonists to harvesting grounds where they extract genetic material in a desperate search for a cure to the disease destroying their species. Now they've found what they're looking for—and she's one of Quintos's own crew.

Lieutenant Akari James isn't just a prisoner. She's the genetic key to Sheentah’s survival. They will never let her go.

With an undermanned ship, a skeleton fleet, and a ChronoBot slowly losing his mind to enemy programming, Quintos faces impossible odds. Thousands of human captives. Twelve alien dreadnoughts. And a ticking clock before the enemy jumps away forever.

Then the message arrives: Ranch under attack. Bastion alive. Help. A thousand light-years from home, Quintos can do nothing as Pristy and his niece Sonya fight for their lives against a Pylor warlord everyone thought was dead. Two battles. Two fronts. And no way to be in both places at once.

Some debts cost more than you ever agreed to pay.