Cross and Spear
Why couldn’t I get a good assignment like Herculaneum or Pompeii? Herculaneum, he visualized the beautiful southern women, their hair black as sable with those curves like no other in…
Bruce Ryba
Biography
I am a Flint knapper (Make stone arrowheads) Kayak racer, 24 hour paintball nut, Work Kennedy space Center as a fiber optic specialist meaning I get to go everywhere on center which is pretty cool. Oh and I was a diver for the Air Force Eastern test range for seven years killing lobster
Oh, and I rescue pet turkeys, one of my YouTube videos on Turkeys has 500,000 views, I know it’s not a lot in the Scheme of things, but it made me go holy shit
Books
Freedom’s Quest (Freedom’s Quest, The New World, Florida)
Desperate times call for bold action.
In a desperate move to retain Florida and protect the treasure-laden galleons on their dangerous return journey to Europe, the King of Spain issues a royal decree offering refuge to all English slaves who escape Florida and pick up a musket to defend the coquina walls of Saint Augustine.
In another bold gamble, the King offers refuge to the dissatisfied Indian nations of the southeast who will take up arms against the English.
Clans, traumatized by war and disease, cross the Spanish Frontier to settle the cattle-rich land and burned missions of Florida.
Follow the descendants of the conquistador Louis Castillo in remote Spanish Florida, a wildland swept by diseases, hurricanes, and northern invasions.
A Maroon captain is assigned an easy mission to retrieve Scottish castaways at St. Lucie Inlet and learns the true cost of being a leader.
A broken nation of Native Americans crosses the St. Marys River to begin a new life in the nearly empty land of Flordia.
The world’s largest treasure fleet crashes ashore upon the east coast of Florida, and one survivor struggles to maintain her deception in a world turned upside down.
Two armies clash over a fort named Bloody Fort Mose.
Two Scots invading Florida lean the price of their trespass.
A Militia Captain whose family was stolen by northerners pays back a debt of honor.
A hunter hired to provide food for the doomed colony of New Symna learns the true cost of freedom.
Four witches train a runaway in the art of witchery and release a ghost………maybe.
These and other lost tales of old Florida—book Two of Freedom’s Quest.
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Freedom’s Quest (Freedom’s Quest, The New World, Florida)
After the golden conquests of Mexico and Peru, Hernando De Soto forms the largest European army seen in the new world, and in 1539 invades Florida to begin his historic four year march across the Southeastern United States. In each Native American community, Soto replenishes the 500 Indian slaves chained to carry the army’s baggage.
After a disastrous victory in Alabama, Soto fearing mutiny, orders soldiers to locate the supply ships somewhere along the Florida Coast, with instructions to send the boats back to Cuba, thereby thwarting any mutiny. The soldiers search for the ships while encountering Native American towns emptied of people due to the new European diseases. One such group of soldiers have a disastrous encounter with Native Americans, and one of the soldiers becomes a slave to the Indians of East Florida, known as the “Ais.” This soldier begins his long recovery from PTSD until the Ais are attacked by Cuban slave raiders & the soldier is adapted into the community of the Ais. (note: I was not aware this description was needed-and so this the roughed out version, I can clean it up if needed.)
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Lake 33 Killing Relic
Across eastern Missouri, the deadly legacy of World War Two lingers from secret uranium processing and storage of radioactive materials. Playgrounds near Cold Water Creek are contaminated with elevated radiation levels, and students who graduated from Francis Howell High School adjacent to the Weldon Spring containment dome are getting sick.
An underground landfill fire edging ever closer to illegally dumped radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project threatens all of St. Louis. Public action groups organize in a desperate plea for help as loved ones suffer from ever-increasing radiation-related cancer.
A looter searching August A. Busch Conservation Area for Native American artifacts discovers a priceless artifact among a cache of radioactive barrels. When terrorists explode a dirty bomb near the West Lake landfill in North County, all signs point to a haunted cave and a veteran recently released from prison.
Author Bruce Ryba, amateur historian, explorer, and Flintknapper. A serendipitous United States Air Force assignment to humid Florida resulted in careers, first as a diver for the Air Force Eastern Test Range and then as a fiber optic communications specialist at Kennedy Space Center during the Space Shuttle and Artemis Programs.
Coming Soon
