When a Type 0 civilization meets a Type II civilization, there are no negotiations and no treaties. There is only survival on terms the weaker side never chose.
Thousands of years after humanity nearly vanished, its descendants have rebuilt, spread across the solar system, and learned to believe they are finally masters of their own future.
They are wrong.
Lieutenant Colonel James Max Hunter commands 1st Battalion, 5th Marines aboard the space carrier USS Basilone, training for a war most political leaders refuse to believe is coming.
Then moons begin disappearing.
Something has entered the solar system.
The Centaurians-a silicon-based aquatic species from Proxima Centauri b-have technology an entire civilization level beyond humanity's own. Hidden near Uranus, they are dismantling moons for raw materials, constructing a massive Dyson ring, and preparing for a conflict humanity may not be technologically capable of winning.
When that war reaches Europa, Max and the crew of the Basilone are thrown into humanity's first true interstellar conflict.
There are no effortless victories here. Spacecraft do not fly like atmospheric airplanes. Distance matters. Orbital mechanics matter. Logistics matter. Command decisions have consequences, and every mistake costs lives.
As Marines fight beneath alien skies and warships clash across millions of kilometers of space, commanders must make impossible decisions while politicians light-years from the battlefield question the people actually fighting it.
And hanging over everything is a question no one yet understands:
Why are the Centaurians really here?
Years later, from inside a Centaurian prison cell, a father tells his young daughter how the war began-and how humanity discovered that surviving the first battle was never the same thing as winning the war.
PROXIMA WAR: IT BEGINS is the first novel in a five-book hard military science fiction series built around grounded science, authentic military tactics, fleet combat, first contact, command friction, and the brutal consequences of humanity confronting a civilization that has already mastered the power of stars.
For readers of hard military science fiction, military space opera, realistic space warfare, first-contact science fiction, and large-scale fleet combat.
Humanity thought it was ready for war.
It wasn't ready for this one.