White Ops 5 Has Released

Space Knight Templars versus Alien Mafia

We interrupt this week-long retread of book blogs to bring you a blog about the New Release that came out this week.

As most people have figured it out, my space opera White Ops was inspired by fan fiction about a certain TV show about a space station. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night.

The name of the place was

Anyway, books four and five have centered around one line from the original Babylon 5 pilot. It was a plot element that—strangely, for this show—was never followed up on.

In the pilot, the punchline was that the shape-shifting assassin was an alien with a holographic projector, mimicking other people. The alien was from a clan that had been cut off from the whole of society. They were now shunned, running underground from the society, contracting out as assassins…

When I pointed this idea out to my father — I was 16 at the time— his reply was “Well, that’s funny. Does that mean they have their own mafia?”

Welcome to how book 4 and 5 started.

Now, to be perfectly serious, this plotline started in book 3. If you remember, human terrorists were using alien weapons. There was also a thread back there that didn’t seem to go anywhere. Well, it’s going somewhere, and it runs right into this novel. And I’ve been building this thing as well as I can, and let’s hope it all holds together.

Originally, White Ops was built as a series of vignettes. They were short stories strung together. Book #3, the hostage takeover of Not-DisneyPlanet, was originally a 30 page short story. Don’t ask, it involved a lot of convenient escape hatches and coincidences. The key to extending it was to introduce character elements, and a ton of road blocks. And it wasn’t that hard to expand.

But in this series of shorts, the Mafia was book #4. Trust me, I’ve cut out a lot of garbage that will never see the light of day.

Making the villain a local mafia created even more roadblocks for the team. Renar is a world with no crime — officially. On a planet of billions, there are maybe a million people locked away as “mentally unbalanced.” I think it was less, but I don’t have my notes in front of me.

Then introduce a whole clan, with thousands of families dedicated to crime? Well, that would throw a monkey wrench into the whole system, now wouldn’t it? So it has to be done very, very quietly. So we can’t just nuke them. We’d have to take them out in such a way that the entire planet will never notice.

Which means an infiltration of the mafia, and killing each and everyone one of them. And they’re all aliens, making them stronger and faster than most of our heroes.

Six Rangers versus six thousand alien mafia. How hard could that be?

Heh heh heh.