Castle Vroman
(A Galaxy Unknown Book VI)
A novel by Thomas DePrima
From inside a giant asteroid, hundreds of light
years from Earth, Admiral Jenetta Carver® is
beginning to look forward to a trip home, and
finally receiving command of her own ship. Her five
year tour of duty as the Base Commander of the
Stewart SC Base is nearing an end, and the ship
carrying her replacement has been underway for more
than a year.
But when the GSC destroyer carrying Admiral Vroman
is attacked just a few light years from the base,
her plans are quickly forgotten. Rescue ships
arriving at the site the next day find that only
corpses remain aboard the Lisbon, while a severely
damaged freighter with a dead Tsgardi crew floats
nearby. There's no sign of the admiral, and
most of the crew is unaccounted for.
Obviously, the freighter was a party to the attack,
and replaying the Lisbon's video logs clearly show
the other ships involved in the ambush. The fact
that those other ships were all of Milori design,
suggests that the Milori and the Raiders have now
combined forces to bring down the Galactic Alliance.
The Milori, unsuccessful in their first attempt to
defeat the Galactic Alliance and annex it's
territory, prepare for a second assault. Emperor
Maxxiloth has decided he won't be embarrassed a
second time and sends every ship available in his
empire as part of the new invasion force.
When a ship carrying the admiral assigned to replace
Captain Jenetta Carver® as commander of the GA's most
forward base is attacked, and the surviving crew
kidnapped, all forces in the sector are immediately
put are on alert. A search for the missing crew and
their attackers begins in earnest, but with
thousands of square light-years of space to cover
around Stewart Space Command Base, the task is a
daunting one, and some might say impossible. When
Jenetta learns of the new plot by the Milori to
conquer the Galactic Alliance, locating and rescuing
the crew of the Lisbon must receive a lower
priority.
Months later, a shuttle touches down on a primeval
world far inside the Frontier Zone, where Admiral
Vroman and the senior officers from the GSC
destroyer Lisbon are to be marooned by their Milori
captors. As the rest of the crew is being shuttled
down to the surface, the officers quickly draw up a
plan of survival. Left with only the most basic of
supplies and equipment, the spaceship crew must
learn how to exist in a hostile, planetary
environment.
While the forces at Stewart are preparing for an
imminent attack by the Milori, the crew of the
Lisbon are learning that they have some rather large
and particularly nasty neighbors with voracious
appetites and predacious habits.