A Texas Naval Affair

At eighteen, Allen Rupert's criminal past caught up with him and he faces a choice of military or prison. To get as far from central Texas as possible, he joins the navy but spends half of his time in the brig.
Recognizing Allen's mechanical skill, he's trained as a machinist and assigned to the small corvette Liberty, patrolling the Gulf of Mexico. During an ASW drill, Allen defuses a torpedo that went live in its tube, and is summoned to the bridge. There, Acting Captain Ryland Rigó commends him for his good work.
For the first time in his life, Allen sees someone look at him with respect. Weeks later, ashore, he invites her to lunch. To his utter shock, she accepts.
Thinking her just another girl, Allen is shaken to his core to find himself swept into a maelstrom of domestic politics, international intrigue, and the plots and plans of Demi-humans and Machines. All while trying to fix his broken life and attain the only thing he wants: Ryland.

One-time design engineer, some-time pharmacy technician, full-time father and writer. Clayton Barnett continues to reinvent himself even into his dotage. Having tried his hand at writing visual novels a couple of years before, he thought that was all over. However, when unexpectedly confronted by National Novel Writing Month of November 2014... a throw-away line from Prof. Glenn Reynolds of UTenn-Knoxville linked with an image of Hatsune Miku in Clayton's mind, and he was off. Twenty three days later, he'd his first novel, "The Fourth Law."
Liking the people he met there, he set another irrational deadline and wrote some more of what is now called the Machine Civilization future history. That turned into his second novel, "Echoes of Family Lost." For NaNoWriMo 2015, he began "Crosses and Doublecrosses," a political-espionage thriller, but was thwarted by the genre and his wife's diagnosis of lymphoma. To give himself something to do and exercise his mind, he wrote the free webnovel, "Defiant."
With his best friend now in remission, he turned towards something lighter and untried: a children's book! Scouring the internet for an illustrator, he reached out to Claudia Gadotti in New Zealand for his most recent addition, "Henge's Big Day!"
To-date, Clayton has written and published twenty books in ten years.
Clayton lives in central Ohio with his wife and and various animals, with his two daughters now grown and out pursuing their lives.