Release date: February 26, 2019
Subgenre: Space Opera, Military Science Fiction
About The Well of Time:
Michael Glover, a military genius of the First Empire awakened from cold
sleep after two thousand years, has spearheaded the Second Empire’s
efforts against the Imperium.
But once the Imperium is defeated, it becomes apparent that the war is not over.
Second Empire ships are still being hijacked and Second Empire citizens sold into slavery. Spies and saboteurs continue to bore from within.
The Empire has enemies and those enemies are more powerful than the Second Empire can imagine.
Michael Glover and his crew are determined to discover the source of the conspiracy but before they can do so, a fleet of advanced ships, as large and as dangerous as the ships of the Second Empire, pose a new challenge to the Imperial worlds.
As the Empire teeters on the brink, Michael Glover must search for the final clue at the hidden Well of Time.
But once the Imperium is defeated, it becomes apparent that the war is not over.
Second Empire ships are still being hijacked and Second Empire citizens sold into slavery. Spies and saboteurs continue to bore from within.
The Empire has enemies and those enemies are more powerful than the Second Empire can imagine.
Michael Glover and his crew are determined to discover the source of the conspiracy but before they can do so, a fleet of advanced ships, as large and as dangerous as the ships of the Second Empire, pose a new challenge to the Imperial worlds.
As the Empire teeters on the brink, Michael Glover must search for the final clue at the hidden Well of Time.
Excerpt:
Chapter 1
“What an incredible spectacle,” Andreas
Richter said. He stared down at the sands of the arena with a gleeful
expression, entranced by the bloody show. “This display, and our reactions to
it, says something so very basic about humankind. Only when we stare death in
the face do we understand it. Humanity is a race of predators, the most
successful predators the stars have ever seen. Humanity has conquered, and then
conquered again and again, first our own little world, then half the galaxy.”
Michael Glover gave Richter a brooding
look. Michael sincerely doubted that this fat little cockroach had ever ‘stared
death in the face,’ not his own death, at least. Michael had. He had faced
death more times than he could count or cared to remember. Facing death, in
Michael’s opinion, was something to be avoided if possible, and if not
possible, to be dealt with decisively and with overwhelming force.
Richter might be right about the predatory
nature of mankind, but the idea that human beings were the most successful
predators that ‘the stars had ever seen’ was a flight of fantasy combined with
a large dose of wishful thinking. Humanity had not conquered half the galaxy.
They had explored and settled less than half of one spiral arm, and nearly gone
extinct. More than once. The Swarm had been tough, the Hirrill even tougher,
and God knew what still awaited them beyond the edges of deep space.
Michael could appreciate a little
gladiatorial display, a sport that paid homage to humanity’s martial past and
honored traditions. But this? Actual death? For what? Michael smiled at Andreas
Richter and idly considered ‘accidentally’ throwing him over the edge and down
into the arena. See how he liked it when death really did stare him in the
face.
But no. Andreas Richter was an Imperial
Ambassador and Michael Glover was pretending to be a merchant. Play the role,
he told himself, and see where it all took them.
Still, Michael hated this place.
Sirianus-2 was first settled over three
thousand years ago. At the time of its discovery, the Empire had been at war
with an alien race that humanity called the Swarm, otherwise the planet would
have been surveyed and then left alone. Sirianus-2 was not the most attractive
bit of real estate. Even after extensive terraforming, it was barely habitable,
but the Swarm were advancing, and humanity could not afford to ignore territory
that might allow a foothold into human occupied space. If they did not settle
Sirianus-2, then the enemy assuredly would.
For one thing, the planet was too small to
retain an atmosphere for more than a few thousand years, but if the Chancellor
of the Imperial Treasury was willing to pay and the Imperial Military Services
wanted it done, then they could always renew an atmosphere. A larger issue was
Sirianus’ unstable energy emissions. Sunspot activity cycled on and off every
twenty-three years. Every twenty-three years, therefore, the little world grew
hot. Very hot. And then, twenty-three years later, the planetary temperature
receded to the merely uncomfortable.
Again, nothing that experienced
exo-biologists couldn’t handle. They seeded the planet with vermiliaforms,
small, almost microscopic flora that floated high in the atmosphere. Every
twenty-three years, the vermiliaforms bloomed, hazing the sky, absorbing the
sun’s increasing energy and converting it into world spanning, gossamer thin
sheets of starchy fiber, similar to cellulose, that drifted down to the ground
and could then be burned for fuel, woven into cloth, or, treated with the proper
enzymes, turned into edible sugars.
Hot, dry, dusty but livable, Sirianus-2
had become the first line of defense against the enemy. A success. The Swarm
was long since defeated, and upon confinement to their own worlds, had
committed mass, racial suicide. This had bothered the Imperial authorities not
in the slightest. It was a big galaxy and if a marauding, genocidal species
could not get by without indulging its primal need to subdue and then eat its
neighbors, then nobody else would miss them.
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About Robert I. Katz:
When I was a child, I generally read five or more books per week, and even then, I had a dim sense that I could do at least as well as many of the stories that I was reading. Finally, around 1985, with a job and a family and my first personal computer, I began writing. I quickly discovered that it was not as easy as I had imagined, and like most beginning writers, it took me many years to produce a publishable work of fiction. My first novel, Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future, came out in 2001. It won the ASA Literary Prize for 2001 and received excellent reviews from Science Fiction Chronicle, InfinityPlus, Scavenger’s Newsletter and many others.
My agent at the time urged me to write mysteries, as mysteries are supposed to have a larger readership and be easier to publish than science fiction. Since I have read almost as many mysteries as science fiction and fantasy, and since I enjoy them just as much, I had no objection to this plan. The Kurtz and Barent mystery series, Surgical Risk, The Anatomy Lesson and Seizure followed between 2002 and 2009. Reviewers have compared them favorably to Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook and they’ve received positive reviews from The Midwest Book Review, Mystery Review Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Lady M’s Mystery International, Mystery Scene Magazine, Library Journal and many others.
In 2014, I published a science fiction short story, To the Ends of the Earth in the Deep Blue Sea on Kindle for Amazon. Since then, I have made all of my previously published novels available for purchase on Kindle. A new science fiction novel, entitled The Cannibal's Feast, was published in July 2017. The next, entitled The Game Players of Meridien, a tale set far in the future after the collapse of the First Interstellar Empire of Mankind, is the first in a projected seven book science fiction series, and will be published on December 16, 2017. The second novel in the series, The City of Ashes, will appear early in 2018. In addition, a fourth novel in the Kurtz and Barent mystery series, The Chairmen, will also be published in the first half of 2018.
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