THE CITADEL

What follows is a complete science fiction novel that was published in the 1990s. It was the last of a three book series that dealt with military intelligence in the future. It was an outgrowth of what I was doing for the Air Force in the 1980s and it reflects that.

They entire novel is published, through some of it might need to be accessed through the February 2007 archives. I wanted to publish it in order and started with the last chapters, working forward. I thought it might be too confusing for the first chapter to be at the end.

I know that some people like to know how a book comes together. Robert Charles Cornett and I were writing a short series known as "The Fifty Million Years War" (the first of which was "Seeds of War."). We have envisioned something longer and in the course of putting together one of those books, I realized that I had actually written two short novels. One took place on a water world and about halfway through that book, the action shifted to the world of The Citadel. I realized that the reader might not like that transition. Because of that, I chopped this story out of the other series (and the book which became "The Aquarian Campaign").

But when it came time to write the last of the books in what is known as the "Military Intelligence" series, I thought that his might be a good place to rewrite that part of a book I had edited out. The Citadel was born in that way.

I wanted each of the books to be stand alone, which means that if you picked up the third book first, all the information you needed to understand that story was in that book. It didn’t rely on a reader who had already read the first two books. So, as they refer to the asteroid that had trapped them, they are referring to events in the second book called "The Rat Trap". There is no need to read that book to follow the action in this one.

This book contains the complete text of the published novel, though there have been slight modifications so they do not agree exactly.

So you now have all the information you need to read this book. Enjoy.