Princess' Crusade (American Imperium Trilogy)

After nearly a generation the city-state of Knoxville is beginning to thrive following the collapse of the United States. However, its closest outlet to the sea, the port of Savannah, over the mountains and downriver, is occupied by the Chinese Army who impose crushing tariffs. The city fathers have only one person to turn to for help.
Growing up trained by her military father and with a nervous system vastly modified by the Thinking Machines, Faustina Hartmann builds a private army of two brigades – called legions – to march on the Savannah garrison and liberate it, for her city and herself. But the Chinese have many technological advantages, not the least of which is their orbital bombardment battle station.
Calling herself demi-human, Faustina's ambition far outstrips the liberation of one port city. As the interior of America comes back to life it will need a strong guiding hand and she sees that hand as her own.

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.