Jack Commer, Supreme Commander Series

Inexplicable solar system disasters confound humanity as the outer planets explode and asteroids are thrown into the sun. These horrors force the development of the United System Space Force and a panicky acceleration of space technology and weaponry. But human conflict accelerates even after Mars exploration and the discovery of Star Drive, and the USSF renders the Earth uninhabitable when Captain Jack Commer drops the planet-wrecking Xon bomb to end the Final War. The remnants of Earth’s population hastily evacuate to Mars, but somehow the USSF has overlooked an intelligent race on Mars which is extremely displeased at the arrival of two billion shellshocked humans. Soon native Martians rise in rebellion, led by their treasonous human emperor. Jack and his three brothers are sent into the deep desert to battle Martian insurgents armed with shatterguns that crack their victims into millions of jagged pieces of glass. Then Jack compromises the entire mission when he falls in love with the Martian emperor’s beautiful brainwashed consort.

Jack Commer, Supreme Commander of the United System Space Force, leads a peace mission in his flagship Typhoon II to end the war with the fascist Alpha Centauri Empire. After an engine explosion strands the ship four months from its destination, the Typhoon encounters a derelict spaceship, but its nine rescued refugees are insolent and uncooperative, and they proceed to brainwash most of the crew into worship of the Alpha Centaurian Emperor. A month and a half later, all but three of the crew have been Converted. Jack has demanded daily diary entries from the remaining crew so that he can pinpoint the exact moment of their Conversion, and he, his estranged wife Amav, the emotionally damaged twelve year-old Bobby, and recently Converted ship’s engineer Phil Sperry write their final, fully honest entries before the ship is captured by Centaurian stormtroopers and Jack and Amav are sent to be tortured on a barren planet.

Ranna Kikken creates the Committee to End Suffering on Planet Earth, but its first 2028 conference is ruined when ex-astronaut Joe Commer time-travels from 2036 to lecture Ranna’s nonprofit ladies on the coming breakdown of the solar system and an unavoidable war with a psychotic Alpha Centaurian Empire. Tormented by his role in dropping the superbomb that ended the Final War but rendered Earth uninhabitable, Joe has quit the Space Force, much to the disgust of his older brother Jack, Supreme Commander of the United System Space Force. Meanwhile, feckless young Urside Charmouth is horrified by the revelations from the future, fearing that he’s harmed the timeline with his own drug-like time travel experiments.

Supreme Commander Jack Commer and his wife Amav journey to a backward agricultural world for a painful reunion with their son Jonathan James, survivor of a childhood abduction by Alpha Centaurian security forces. Choosing to remain secluded in the shattered Centaurian empire in the aftermath of its lost war with Sol, Jonathan James has authored a bestselling novel about the collapse of Alpha Centaurian culture. Jack and Amav are furious that their arrogant son refuses to attend his own literary award celebration party, or to even see his parents. Instead he sends his pet robot to summarize the novel, which is devoted to ridiculing a dimwitted caricature of his father. But the robot, modeled after Jack’s dead brother John, gloats that the book is actually malware designed to resurrect the fascist Grid of the ancient Alpha Centaurian Empire.

When a star thirty-four light-years away vanishes, leaving the infrared signature of a Dyson sphere inexplicably built in one week, Supreme Commander Jack Commer readies the untested Typhoon V for the star Iota Persei, roping in a talented replacement engineer doubtful of Jack’s command capabilities, and cajoling a navigator beset by decades-old combat trauma into postponing his retirement for one last risky mission. Meanwhile Jack’s previous engineer, who quit the Space Force to become Consort to the Martian Empress, begins to remember that he’s a really a spy for the Wounded, a race that kills suns to create spectacular quasar artworks fifteen billion light-years away.

When the solar system adopts the buggy SolGrid telepathic network as a defense against alien intrusion, Jack Commer’s impudent son Jonathan James instigates a rebellion against what he considers fascist brainwashing. His tiny army includes his lover Suzette, the wife of Jack’s Typhoon VI weapons officer; exobiologist Jackie Vespertine, emissary to aliens in the Iota Persei system; and the telepathic Beagle Trotter, bonded in an ancient Alpha Centaurian ritual to Jonathan James as warrior-brother. Jonathan James even convinces Patrick, the computer hacker who designed SolGrid, that his dysfunctional creation is wrecking Sol culture. Smitten with the voluptuous Suzette, Pat finally accepts a place in the rebellion, but is he’s stunned when Jonathan James storms an orbiting museum and not only steals Typhoon II, Jack Commer’s obsolete 2030’s spaceship, but also kidnaps the Emperor of the Martians.

Physician Amy Nortel recreates Jack Commer’s murdered son Jonathan James as a robot of the Wounded, a race that destroys stars for kicks. Jack and his wife Amav arrest the Wounded doctor, but she kidnaps the Commers’ robot dog and escapes in lovestruck pursuit of Jonathan James. Jack readies the untested Typhoon VII to chase both son and doctor, but finds himself saddled with cheeky, flirtatious robot Laurie Lachrer 283, now certified as superior to the human engineer she’s modeled on. On a toxic waterworld in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 163,000 light-years away, Jonathan James rises to captain Balloon Ship Armageddon, ending millennia of combat between floating ships manned by deluded robot sailors. Yet he’s terrified by the Holy Chamber in his cargo hold. Only deactivated robot dog Edward understands its ancient, inexplicable star map warning of an abrupt termination of the universe.