Hard Science Fiction Space

A year ago the Kher Empire was forced to retreat, but they were not beaten. In Orion Fleet, they return with a new weapon. A huge ship driven by AI begins methodically grinding inhabited worlds to dust. This unstoppable enemy is without fear or remorse, and the Rebels begin a desperate battle just to slow its advance. Leo Blake takes Earth's first warship into space to find a counter to this deadly new attack. The Imperial Fleets take notice of Earth's interference, and they're intent upon revenge. Even if he wins, Blake might have doomed our homeworld.

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 stabilized. So corruption is rife, people starve, and the poor are policed by mechanized 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.

Trapped on an alternate Earth, the combined crews of a crashed Russian spaceship, a British expeditionary force and a group of strays from the future must work together to survive, escape and discover what led them to this point. All are from parallel universes where small changes in history led to different realities, and the tensions between the groups are rising.

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.

The extermination of Earth is at hand. With his increasingly irrational leadership Basil Wenceslas, chairman of the Hansa, has driven humanity into a corner. His punitive treatment of the Hansa colonies and the Roamers, as well as his refusal to aid an embattled Theroc, have made enemies for the people of Earth.

Captain Keyes is loved by the public but hated by Command. He captains the UHS Providence, an aging supercarrier and the last human ship not dependent on dark tech - technology humanity has used to rule over the galaxy since barely defeating the Ixa in the First Galactic War.

It is 2076: Lancer, Earth’s first starship, is on a mission to find interstellar civilizations. Although astronaut Nigel Walmsley’s experiences with alien encounters make him the expert, no one believes Nigel’s theory that machines are the dominant intelligent beings left in the galaxy and that their purpose is to annihilate all organic life. Then the explorers discover once-living planets where only machines remain – and ruined worlds where fugitive survivors must evade omnipresent and lethally advanced A.I. warships.

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.

With the Federation losing ground in its war against the Dominion, the galaxy's greatest smugglers, including the beautiful and enigmatic Vash, rendezvous on Deep Space 9. Their objective: a fabled lost orb of the Prophets unlike any other, rumored to be the key to unlocking a second wormhole in Bajoran Space, a second Celestial Temple.

Warden Torin Kerr has put her past behind her and built a life away from the war and everything that meant. She's created a place and purpose for others like her, a way to use their training for the good of the Confederation. She has friends, family, purpose. Unfortunately, her past refuses to grant her the same absolution. Big Yellow, the ship form of the plastic aliens responsible for the war, returns. The Silsviss test the strength of the Confederation. Torin has to be Gunnery Sergeant Kerr once again and find a way to keep the peace.

Half-Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman has been selected for the ground team of the first manned expedition to our mysterious neighbor planet. Joining an international team of astronauts and scientists, he endures the rigors of training, the dangers of traveling an incredible distance in space, the challenges of an alien landscape, and the personal and political conflicts that arise when the team must face the most shocking discovery of all.

The year is AD 7000. The human species is extinct - for the fourth time - due to its fragile nature. Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water-world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, suspects that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye.

Astronaut Lee Rifkin's life is about to change. NASA has done the math. The space object named Cassandra 22007 is not behaving as expected. He will lead a team on a cutting-edge ship to get a closer look. But another group wants to get there first. Who is this shadow organization that seems to be one step ahead of them? Agent Jenna Haynes works to put together the pieces that will pull the veil off those who seem to have known about Cassandra's arrival since long before NASA spotted it. What is their goal?

Three against the stars! A sky pirate armed with superior weapons of his own invention.... First contact with an alien race dangerous enough to threaten the safety of two planets.... The arrival of an unseen dark sun whose attendant marauders aimed at the very end of civilization in this Solar System.... These were the three challenges that tested the skill and minds of the brilliant team of scientist-astronauts Arcot, Wade, and Morey.

The Polity is under attack from a 'melded' AI entity with control of the lethal Jain technology, yet the attack seems to have no coherence. When one of Erebus' wormships kills millions on the world of Klurhammon, a high-tech agricultural world of no real tactical significance, agent Ian Cormac is sent to investigate, though he is secretly struggling to control a new ability no human being should possess...and beginning to question the motives of his AI masters.

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.

In Neal Asher's Hilldiggers, during a war between two planets in the same solar system - each occupied by adapted humans - what is thought to be a cosmic superstring is discovered. After being cut, this object collapses into four cylindrical pieces, each about the size of a tube train. Each is densely packed with either alien technology or some kind of life. They are placed for safety in three ozark cylinders of a massively secure space station.

Commander Scott McNabb and the crew of the science vessel, Hermes, are three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. The ship contains an experimental quantum device, lost while en route to a research colony on Europa.

NASA finally made it. The very first human has just set foot on the surface of our neighbor planet. This is the start of a long research expedition that sent four scientists into space. But the four astronauts of the NASA crew are not the only ones with this destination. The privately financed "Mars for Everyone" initiative has also targeted the Red Planet. Twenty men and women have been selected to live there and establish the first extraterrestrial settlement.

Cajeiri is the young son of the powerful leader of the Western Association-and he has become a target for forces bent on destroying his father's rule. For Cajeiri is the first ateva to understand the humans living among them-an understanding that threatens his own race.