Showing results by author "Shane Gries" in All Categories

On a hot July day on the plains of Kansas, a US Army mechanized infantry company from the First Infantry Division gets a very vague warning order, and the young troopers saddle up on their steel beasts to go try to control "civil unrest".

The best place to be in an Apocalypse is inside a thirty ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle grinding rotting bodies to paste under your tracks or using an Abrams 120mm canister round to turn a horde of undead into a pink mist. Here’s the thing though … tracks and guns and the people who operate them wear out, even as the living corpses keep coming at you.

The world has descended into chaos, but it isn't the undead that are the worst part. Panic, broken supply lines, disrupted communications, terrorized refugees, the friction and fog of war all combine to make hell on Earth. The battered men and women of America's storied First Infantry Division, based out of Fort Riley Kansas, are ordered to give up their fights in the cities and retreat towards to the National Redoubt in the Northwest.

When the royal government of the Interstellar Commonwealth was overthrown, the Imperial Family fled into the forgotten depths of space, seeking a colony that had been abandoned thousands of years ago. After a hasty jump and then five years of grueling sublight travel, the battered fleet enters the system to find a thriving pre-space flight human culture. A culture that remembered nothing of their origins.

When society crumbles under the onslaught of civil war, the losing side has only three choices: run, hide, or die. The Imperial family chose to run. Their tattered fleet of warships limps its way across the galaxy, seeking a near-mythical refuge, a world not recorded on any star chart. Unfortunately, this lost world turns out to have its own thriving pocket of humanity. And while they lack spacefaring technology, the locals aren't willing to share.