A Bastard's Oath

Planet Tirano creates a unique milieu for the stories of the series The Encircling Belts of Tirano Saga. Planet Tirano’s aristocracy consists only of pureblooded descendants of the leaders of the mother ship that landed two millennia ago. An order of genetically engineered women, all of whom were conceived in vitro, control Tirano’s computer network and hyperspace portals. The Vhirko, clones of women who died valiantly in battle, guard Tirano’s monarch at all times. Tirano has been at war for decades with a savage alien species that becomes sentient only if mentally linked in groups of four or more.

Tirano’s King Mhikhel unleashes fundamental, and uncontrollable, changes to this milieu when he acknowledges as his child an illegitimate son of a commoner and raises the child (Tarnlot) as a prince. Despite the aristocracy’s antagonism, Mhikhel grooms Tarnlot to serve as the Lord Chancellor (the highest governmental post, which is normally held by a member of the aristocracy) when Mhikhel’s heir (Prince Zhun’Mar) assumes the throne.

In A Bastard’s Oath Tarnlot must rescue the throne for Zhun’Mar’s by foiling both an aristocrat’s coup d’etat and the aliens’ coup de main. In the series’ second installment, A Dream Is A Pinhole In Time, Tarnlot and Zhun’Mar escape an ambush in deep space by entering a hyperspace fissure that strands them on a planet in an unknown galaxy: present day Earth. The third installment, Outliers of Tirano, begins the stories of Siniastra, Zhun’Mar's daughter.
Even though the installments occur in chronological order, each is an independent story. Accordingly, you can read the stories in any order.