William Speir is an award-winning author living in Texas. Raised in Alabama, he is a 1984 graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. William retired from corporate life in 2009, after spending 25 years as an executive and a management consultant specializing in the human impact to change. He is also an amateur historian and Civil War artillery expert. In 2015, William signed with Progressive Rising Phoenix Press (PRPP) to publish his fiction and non-fiction works, which span the Action-Adventure, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, and Fantasy genres. For more information about William's books and book-projects, please visit his website at WilliamSpeir.com. J. C. "Kurt" Newman is a retired US Government employee living in the southeastern United States. Kurt's career includes four decades with the military and a variety of federal "alphabet" agencies-running the geographic gamut from Afghanistan through Zimbabwe. He decided that collaborating in creative fiction could prove the best way to satisfy the requirements of the CIA's Prepublication Classification Review Board that wields veto power over his written output-conflating characters, changing names (to protect the guilty), shifting chronology, and using regional descriptions to disguise the more unsavory regimes depicted.