Killer
Roman arenas, famous for pitting man against man, beast against beast and man against beast.  Good performers were always in demand - even on other planets.  One such survived a shuttlecraft being destroyed on an landing attempt, this creature escaped, and began a savage killing spree.  The Galactic civilization knew that if the intelligent, killing machine creature (called a Phile) survived, it could cover our planet with its kind, which would necessitate the destruction of our Earth.  So they sent an emissary to destroy the creature, unaware that he was the power behind capturing the killing machine Phile to start with, with an eye for creating more of them for the galaxy blood arenas.  Meanwhile, a crazed Roman emperor wants the beast captured for his own arena, and the crooked emissary wants to do just that for Phile breeding purposes,  Only a hero could stop either of them, the Phile or the crooked emissary, which Master Author David Drake masterly provides - not a magical hero - just a hard man who has only survived by being smarter and tougher than the things he has had to deal with.  A great read.   gmb 12/12/2019
Science fiction, Fiction, general
David Drake, Karl Edward Wagner
The Army took David Drake from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn’t run fast enough to get away.

Dave returned to become Chapel Hill’s Assistant Town Attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences.

Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background.

Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.

http://david-drake.com/2011/biographies/ || American writer, poet, editor, and publisher of horror, science fiction, and heroic fantasy,