A Learning Experience

When a bunch of interstellar scavengers approach Earth intending to abduct a few dozen humans and sell them into slavery in the darkest, they make the mistake of picking on Steve Stuart and his friends, ex-military veterans all. Unprepared for humans who can actually fight, unaware of the true capabilities of their stolen starships, the scavengers rapidly lose control of the ship - and their lives.

Fifty years after Steve Stuart and his friends captured an alien starship, the Solar Union is a thriving interstellar power while Earth is increasingly backward and falling into barbarism. For two youngsters from Earth, the Solar Union offers the only chance they will ever have to make something of their lives.

In the wake of Earth's collapse into chaos, Captain Hoshiko Stuart made the mistake of speaking her mind - and was exiled six months from Sol to a naval base in an unexplored and uncontacted sector. Placed in command of a single squadron of starships, she expected nothing but boredom. But when she discovers an alien race threatening to exterminate all other races within the sector, Hoshiko and her squadron are drawn into a war to stop them.

In the wake of the Solar Union’s stunning victory over the Tokomak - the masters of the galactic community - humanity has been invited to send a diplomatic mission to the Kingdom of Harmonious Order, one of the oldest and most significant races in known space. It is an opportunity that cannot be missed, a chance to forge ties with a powerful ally. And so a lone starship is dispatched to the galactic core to open discussions. But when that starship runs into a deadly trap, she and her crew must battle their way home before they are merely the first casualties in a renewed war.

The Tokomak, the unquestioned masters of the galaxy, have dispatched a massive fleet to crush the Solar Union - and the fledgling Galactic Alliance - before the human race and its alien allies can tear the galactic order asunder. Hundreds of thousands of starships under the command of an alien tactical genius, bent on exterminating the entire human race...the darkest hour is truly at hand.

Humanity has won a great victory, shattering the alien fleet that would have destroyed the Solar Union and exterminated the human race. But the war is not yet over. The Tokomak still have a huge fleet and an immense industrial base, large enough to crush the human race once and for all if they have time to bring it into action. The war may still be lost.

The strong races rule the galaxy, doing as they please. The weak are enslaved or driven from their homeworlds or simply exterminated by the ruling powers. The Solar Union's only hope of survival is to master GalTech and improve upon it before the Galactics realize the human race is no longer trapped on a primitive world, at the mercy of any spacefaring race who stumbles across it. But GalTech keeps its secrets close, and time is not on humanity's side.

Fifty years ago, a human covert operations team—The Firelighters—raided Belosi, a world held in bondage by the alien Tichck, and rescued thousands of Belosi from slavery, taking them into space to form the core of a future liberation force. Since then, a cloud of secrecy has descended over Belos, with no word of the fate of the trapped Belosi allowed to escape the system. Now, with the Tokomak War over and the Galactics in disarray, the Solar Union intends to honor its promises to the exiled Belosi, by supporting their fleet in a bid to reclaim their stolen homeworld.