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Overview: F.A. Whittaker is a retired Bank executive who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with his wife. A lifelong fan of thoughtful, science-based space opera (David Weber, etc.), he decided to try his hand at writing in this genre upon retirement. In order to prepare for and sustain this challenging task, he completed a nine-month post-graduate certificate in Creative Writing via correspondence at a local college, and also subjected the early drafts of the first two Books of the VEX Universe Chronicles to detailed interactive scrutiny by a professional editor which provided an invaluable learning experience in the craft of fiction writing. In addition to Books 1-6 of the VEX Universe Chronicles, he has also completed a speculative financial techno-thriller and a mainstream literary novel.

Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy

1. The Dawn of Supremacy
DISEA, the Directorate of Interstellar Expansion and Administration, an erstwhile autonomous agency of Earth’s Union of Secular States, is humanity’s sole owner of VEX-tech, developed during the late twenty-first century. This technology has enabled DISEA to embark on an ambitious program of interstellar exploration and colonization in the Milky Way galaxy.

In early 2151 CE, a squadron of starships in DISEA’s Deep Space Operations Fleet, a navy-inspired quasi-military formation, encounters two abandoned alien starships, the first evidence of non-human sentient life in the galaxy. Perceiving a potential threat, the Fleet Admiral, Caron Lowell, decides to dispatch two Task Groups on different vectors to reconnoiter the inferred places of origin of the two vessels.

Thanks to the devious machinations of his sister, Torry Lynne, a DISEA intelligence operative, Commodore Jared Tone, despite his youth and lack of seniority, is given command of Task Group Three consisting of two massive galactic starships, twenty screening cruisers, two hundred assault craft and a battalion of fleet marines. Torry insists on accompanying him on the mission as his intelligence chief.

Arriving at the terminal coordinates of Task Group Three’s forty-thousand light-year superluminal transit across the galaxy, Jared and Torry are shocked by what they find. Jared’s instructions from Admiral Lowell are simply to “observe and report,” nothing more. He soon discovers that this order has become meaningless, superseded by the reality of “fight for survival.”

2. The Web of Entanglement
Four-year-old Crown Princess Alexandra, eldest child of Jared Tone, Prince Consort, and Alina Khan, Empress Alina I of the Celestial Empire of Summer, becomes close friends with Ryan Zweicker-Delmar. The same age as Alexandra, he is the son of the captain and first officer of Torry Lynne’s personal starship.

The two children soon jointly exhibit unusual behavior that throws the senior members of the imperial family into a state of paranoid turmoil. Jared, Lord High Admiral of the CES, is struggling to build up the CES Imperial Interstellar Navy as an impenetrable bulwark against another potentially genocidal attack on the empire by the Naan robotic starships. He cannot afford to be distracted by the children’s shenanigans, so he leaves it up to Torry, the covert guardian of the imperial family, to investigate the children’s anomalous behavior.

As she gets closer to uncovering the truth, Torry recognizes that the empire again faces imminent annihilation. Time is of the essence, but Torry, the formidable Countess of Lyceum, knows that despite her enormous wealth and power, time is the one commodity that she cannot buy.

3. The Hierarchy Of The Orb
Utilizing her omniscience as the Superior of the Hierarchy of the Orb, and with the assistance of her formidable group of acolytes, nine-year-old Alexandra Tone Khan, Crown Princess of the Celestial Empire of Summer, surreptitiously choreographs the formation of the Confederation of Sentient Domains (CSD). All known sentient species in the Milky Way galaxy fall within its jurisdiction.

Jared Tone, Prince Consort of the Celestial Empire of Summer and Alexandra’s father, is elevated to the rank of Lord High Admiral of the new Confederation of Sentient Domains Navy (CSDN), tasked with protecting the new polity and taking offensive action against the distant Gramin Empire, previously identified by Alexandra as a mortal threat to the CSD. But Jared is stuck with a near impossible task; he has barely enough resources to defend the CSD, especially Earth, which has no intruder detection system, and his first intergalactic jump-carrier which would enable the CSDN to attack the Gramins is years away from being built.

When Alexandra detects certain menacing events in the Gramin Empire via the Orb of Life, she asks her aunt, Torry Lynne, the extraordinarily wealthy Countess of Lyceum, who has just built humanity’s first intergalactic jump-ship as a personal yacht, to go and reconnoiter. Torry makes shocking discovery after shocking discovery in Gramin space. There is very much more to the Gramin Empire than Alexandra believes. The threat to the CSD and to Alexandra personally is not only real but perilously imminent.