Aurora Rising

The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are about to learn where they will serve. Tyler Jones, the top student in his class, expects to pick his own squad from the best of his peers. A reckless act of heroism costs him that choice, and he ends up with the cadets no one else would take.

His team is a mixed and quarrelsome group. A diplomat with a sharp tongue, a scientist who treats everything with cold clinical distance, and a technical genius who resents being there. Add an alien warrior with a short temper and a pilot who wants nothing to do with him. Leading them is the first test Tyler has not prepared for.

Then a routine flight goes wrong. Tyler comes across a ship that disappeared two hundred years earlier and pulls out its only survivor, a girl named Aurora Jie-Lin O'Malley. She has been frozen in cryo-sleep and wakes in a time that is not her own.

Auri may be the spark for a war that has been building for millions of years. The galaxy's best hope may rest on a squad of discipline cases and rejects.

This is science fiction for a young adult audience, set in space and built around an ensemble cast. It opens with the friction of a team that does not get along and moves toward a much larger threat.