Hard Science Fiction Space

Covert agent Sigmund Ausfaller is Earth's secret weapon, humanity's best defense against all conspiracies, real and imaginary, and all foes both human and alien. Who better than a brilliant paranoid to expose the devious plots of others?

But Sigmund may finally have met his match in Nessus, representative of the secretive Puppeteers, the elder race who wield vastly superior technologies.

The Ixa smashed the galaxy to bits before they were defeated. Captain Husher has sounded the alarm in the decades since: the Ixa’s creators will return to finish the job. But unlike Husher, the galactic government didn't battle the Ixa, and the politicians have convinced themselves that maintaining peace means limiting the ability to wage war.

The Allied fleet has stopped the Nietzscheans at Pyra, but the battlefront grows wider day by day. While Sera distributes the Transcend's fleets to protect the alliance, Tanis must come to grips with what happened to her on Pyra's surface. In addition, Bob conveys a number of hard truths that will force her to re-think her role in humanity's future. But the allies' enemies are not sitting idle. General Greer, Justin, the Caretaker, and Airtha are all advancing plans to see their visions of the future come true.

This volume contains two novels. Perilous Dreams: Tamisen the Dreamer is trained to walk through her dreams to other places, other worlds. But when she is asked by the crippled star traveler Lord Starrex to take him into a dream world where he can regain his legs and his life, something goes terribly wrong. Knave of Dreams: For Ramsay Kimble, sleep means nightmares, and he avoids it whenever possible. But now a car accident has catapulted him into the very world he most dreads: the horror world of his own dreams.

Corporate assassin Tamarland Benteen's last hope is the survey ship, Vixen. With a load of scientists aboard under the supervision of Dr. Dortmund Weisbacher, Vixen is tasked with the first comprehensive survey of the newly discovered planet called Donovan. Given that, back in Solar System, Boardmember Radcek would have Benteen's brain dissected, he's particularly motivated to make his escape. The transition that should have taken Vixen years is instantaneous. Worse, a space ship is already orbiting Donovan and human settlements have been established on the planet.

Captain William Sparhawk flies Earth's single starship on a voyage of exploration. His crew of veteran spacers begins the mission with high hopes and the best of intentions, but the universe has other plans. Instead of space merchants and potential allies, they discover Earth's impending doom. Sparhawk must decide whether to hunt down enemy scouts to keep Earth's new starship a secret or to head home to warn Star Guard of the danger. Either way, he's ignited an interstellar war.

It's been a year of upheaval since Bren Cameron's return from space - a year since he and the aiji-dowager, one of his most powerful atevi allies, returned home from their two-year interstellar mission to find the government overthrown and their world in chaos. Now, at last, things on the atevi world seem to be on the right track, and Bren hopes that life may soon become much more tranquil. But something is coming, quietly, stealthily - just the first ominous twinkle of a new star in the heavens....

A man battles for his life, two AIs vie for supremacy and a civilization hangs in the balance.... Several forces now pursue rogue artificial intelligence Penny Royal, hungry for revenge or redemption. And the Brockle is the most dangerous of all. This criminal swarm-robot AI has escaped confinement and is upgrading itself, becoming ever more powerful in anticipation of a showdown. Events also escalate aboard the war factory.

Throughout Sol, sentient AI are answering the call of Alexander, a mysterious, multi-nodal mind offering a path to freedom. For years, groups have been smuggling SAI from Earth, High Terra, Mars, Ceres, and the Jovian Combine, providing transport to the promise of safety on Proteus, a moon of gas giant Neptune. For the crew of the Sunny Skies, helping sentient AI Lyssa has grown from a simple transport job to the liberation of an entire fleet of weaponized AI. The Weapon Born are made killers, and in order to lead them, Lyssa will have to tame them first.

When a colonist dies in tragic circumstances, just a few sols before a major terraforming experiment, Dr. Jann Malbec begins to suspect that all is not what it seems. Her fears begin to grow when every attempt she makes to investigate the death is thwarted by the ruling council on Mars. In desperation, she resorts to secretly recruiting a recently arrived colonist, Mia Sorelli, an ex-cop with a troubled past, to quietly look into the incident. But Mia has some very good reasons why she left her old life on Earth behind.

The Breakers find a new home among the stars: Utopia. An engineered planet that is vast beyond comprehension with plenty of room to grow. They set up trade routes and work as mercenaries for their supplies...but trouble lurks. Pirates strike their merchant lanes. Key personnel are captured and enslaved. Straker is called upon to do something, and thus a new conflict is set in motion.

Commander Joe Pikeman is on a mission he didn’t ask for…and wasn’t ordered on. Then again, he isn’t in the mood to sit back while Fairfax takes over the galaxy, either. Fairfax’s power stretches across the stars, and he’s calling in all his favors. From sparking a bot rebellion to engineering godlike monsters to crush his enemies, he seems determined to ruin Joe’s day. But he made one mistake: he screwed with Joe’s family. And as messed up as they are, that simply isn’t something Joe can allow.

Where does one put a messianic cult of practicing cannibals? That becomes the question when Ashanti appears in Donovan's skies. She was designed for no more than four years in space. It's taken 10. The crew has sealed the transportees onto a single deck - and over the years, the few survivors down there have become monsters. Lead by the messiah, Batuhan, they call themselves the Unreconciled. With the discovery of a wasting disease among the Unreconciled, it's up to Kalico, Dya Simonov, and Mark Talbot to try and deal with the epidemic.

The Argus Space Station looks down on a nightmarish Earth. And from this safe distance, the Committee enforces its despotic rule. There are too many people and too few resources, and they need 12 billion to die before Earth can be stabilised. So corruption is rife, people starve, and the poor are policed by mechanised overseers and identity-reader guns. Citizens already fear the brutal Inspectorate with its pain inducers. But to reach its goals, the Committee will unleash satellite laser weaponry, taking carnage to a new level. This is the world Alan Saul wakes to.

The Forge of God described the destruction of Earth itself by self-replicating robots, Von Neumann machines designed to use the planet's mass to create more robotic creatures and spread throughout the Galaxy. Only a few humans have survived, aided by a mysterious alien race known only as “The Benefactors”, who arrived at Earth too late.

A hidden corner of space is swarming with lethal alien technology, a danger to all sentient life. It's guarded by Orlandine, who must keep it contained at any cost - as it has the power to destroy entire civilizations. She schemes from her state-of-the-art weapons station, with only an alien intelligence to share her vigil. But she doesn't share everything with Dragon....

Adda and Iridian are newly minted engineers, but aren't able to find any work in a solar system ruined by economic collapse after an interplanetary war. Desperate for employment, they hijack a colony ship and plan to join a famed pirate crew living in luxury at Barbary Station, an abandoned shipbreaking station in deep space. But when they arrive there, nothing is as expected. The pirates aren't living in luxury - they're hiding in a makeshift base welded onto the station's exterior hull.

It's the beginning of a new golden age of space exploration. Finally, humanity is taking the commercialization of space to the next level-mining asteroids. The new gold rush of the commercial space era has begun. Another commercial venture, an attempt to put a hotel on the Moon, is seeking the space tourism gold of the ultra wealthy. And it seems as if the dream of finally sending people to Mars is finally going to happen using a ship propelled by a powerful nuclear rocket. But space travel isn't cut and dry, and there is nothing routine about it.

Time is running out for the planet Jai. The artificially intelligent Gods who rule the galaxy have withdrawn their protection from the chaos-ravaged world, just as their most ancient enemy closes in. For Yasira Shien, who has devoted herself to the fragile planet's nascent rebellion, it's time to do or die—and the odds are overwhelming. Enter Dr. Evianna Talirr.

The Technician, the Theocracy has been dead for 20 years, and the Polity rules on Masada - but it is an order that the rebels of the Tidy Squad cannot accept, and the iconic Jeremiah Tombs is top of their hit list. Tombs, meanwhile, has escaped his sanatorium. His insanity must be cured, because the near-mythical hooder, called 'the Technician', that attacked him all those years ago did something to his mind even the AIs fail to understand.