Hard Science Fiction Space Opera

What was the light that mazed every mind's sky - and then was gone? Why has it brought a flying tepui mountaintop home from the stars, and sent investigators into the orbital habitats floating above Earth? How is it connected to a "living fossil" fungus of great entheogenic powers? Or to a dead madman? Or to the fate of a planet overpopulated, hypermediated, corporate dominated, and heat-gas insulated? Forces that are socially and politically polarized, both good and evil, selfless and selfish, must search for the answers to these questions.

This omnibus contains all four books of the Adrift on a Sea of Stars series. Together, they tell the epic saga of the crew of the Beagle, sent to explore our stellar neighborhood.

The four books are:

• Adrift on a Sea of Stars
• Earth Not Forgotten
• The Tarden Agenda
• Republic and Empire

The Battle for Europa is a tale of revolution in the 23rd century. Earth and colonies in the solar system are ruled by The Council of Economic Unions on Earth. The council rules with an iron fist. When Shawn Gallagher, an ice miner on Europa, launches a miner's strike, it is a ruse for rebellion. The ice on the surface of Europa will turn red with blood in The Battle for Europa. When Shawn Gallagher, second shift lead man at mining site A on Europa, launches his bid for independence, little does he know that it will pit him against his little brother David.

Der mittlerweile schwerreiche Robinette Broadhead finanziert einen Forschungsflug in die Oortsche Wolke, um eine zuvor dort entdeckte Nahrungsmittelfabrik der Hitschi zu untersuchen. Wie bei Gateway handelt es sich um einen ausgehöhlten Asteroiden, angefüllt mit Hitschi-Technik.

Major Richards needs to get out of the Sol System. Demoted by the military and hung out to dry, the media labels her the Butcher of Toro. Despite her soiled record, Tanis still one of the best military counterinsurgency officers in the Terran Space Force. They need her to find the terrorists responsible for trying to destroy the GSS Intrepid, a massive interstellar colony ship in the final phases of construction at the Mars Outer Shipyards.

How do you end a war you want no part of? Cass and Ken just want to get back to their plans for exploration. That doesn't seem to be in the cards, though, so now it's time to think outside the box. If the leaders of Artemis won't listen, maybe it's time for new leaders. New tools, new crews, new challenges, but the same Cass and Ken: they're not going to let anything stop them!

The Outer Worlds are engulfed in conflict. The Solar Assembly are preparing to send troops to intervene, a move which threatens to thrust the entire Solar System into civil war. On Mars, Emile Chandraskher and his Formist Faction, are preparing the final stages of their decades-long plan for ultimate control. In the midst of this, an unlikely group of dissenters and misfits emerge. And they have a score to settle!

This wasn't what Lithia had in mind when she decided to run away from home. Her ship was not meant to carry a fugitive wanted in two galaxies or the stowaways running from a war that wasn't hers. She just wanted to live a quiet, peaceful life alongside her brother. But now she knows too much about The Helix, the secret hidden deep within it, and what it would mean for all humankind if she walked away.

2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can't travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She's an 'ape', a 'throwback', but this is one ape girl who won't give in.

The third book in the Web Shifter's Library series returns to the adventures of Esen, a shape-shifting alien who must navigate the perils of a hostile universe.

Konran Andacellos has all but given up on his dream to be a starfighter. After botching an airshow maneuver and being reduced to a captaincy on a rock hauler, the ambitious 22-year-old never expected an ambush to sweep in and blow his convoy to dust. With the lives of his crew on the line, Konran leaps into a pitiful one-man defense craft and obliterates the enemy against impossible odds.

John Bandicut and his companions are summoned to a star-cloud called Starmaker, known to humans as the Orion Nebula, to discover what force threatens newborn stars - and possibly every world within a thousand light-years. Their journey takes them not just into the perils of a stellar nursery, but into confrontation with the Mindaru, a billion-year-old AI and adversary of life as they know it. The task is daunting. But with the aid of Deep and Dark, sentient clouds who are perhaps the strangest beings they have met yet in their exceedingly strange journey, there may be hope.

Xenophobia, the fear of that which is alien, different, or strange; it is xenophobia that drove the reptilian natives of Sua’kul into the arms of an alien force even more terrible than that which they feared. Driven by a radicalized ideology and malevolent intervention, the new order on Sua’kul has become a threat to the Empire. In response the half human and half Illani noble family of Valor has been dispatched to subdue the planet before it can become another front in an ever expanding war of alien aggression against the last vestige of human civilization.

In space, mutiny means death - that’s why Inspector General Park Yerim is taking her investigation so seriously. The alleged mutineer is Captain Nicolau Aames, whose command of the massive Earth-Mars vessel Aldrin has come under fire. The vast System Initiative says he disobeyed orders, but his crew swears he’s in the right. En route to Mars, Park gathers testimony from the Aldrin’s diverse crew, painting a complex picture of Aames’s character: his heroism, his failures, even his personal passions.

Before the time of man, according to the ancient legends, the gods walked the earth. The Egyptians had a name for this time. They called it "Zep Tepi" - the first time. That time is where this story began. Five Moons: Zep Tepi picks up the story 10,000 years later.... It all started with an emergency call from a world at the farthest edges of explored space. “You are our only hope,” they tell Dallas Blake and the crew of the Five Moons. A deadly virus will kill them all if the Five Moons doesn’t get the vaccine to them right away.

Melati escaped New Jakarta Space Station when it fell into Allion's hands. Her family was left behind the enemy lines. She signed up for active duty with the International Space Force in the hope they would liberate the station. Instead, they chose to maintain a crippling siege that has lasted for 10 months.

They came from the poorest cities on Earth. They were promised free food and housing. They didn't know that they, or their children, would never see Earth again. A few years ago, a military doctor walking the corridors of New Jakarta Space Station saved Melati's life. She signed up for the International Space Force to pay back her moral debt to him.

The ITS Santa Maria is a generation ship in the truest sense—her colonial mission to the alluringly habitable TRAPPIST-1 system will span several. Her crew, though, original and descendent both, need not necessarily accept their lot to live and die between the stars. Greased elbows and palms tend to lubricate a path toward longevity. Wealth aboard Santa Maria is measured not in dollars and cents, but in Minutes and Seconds. Work, favors, and shrewdness are paid in Minutesand Minutes are spent in Suspension.

In a future where humanity has scattered itself across the stars and Earth itself is now a dimly remembered place of legend, two worlds of near-supernatural strangeness challenge two naive but courageous heroes.

For many, the dying part is hard. For some, the living part is harder. At 16 years of age, Mathius’ life is focused on scrounging bits of food in the midst of a five-way civil war on the planet Novalis III. Two government factions and three rebel factions are all hell-bent on killing one another, and the civilian population is caught in the middle. If Mathius doesn’t find food, he and his father, mother, and sister will go hungry for the day, a not-so-unusual occurrence.