Hard Space Opera

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!

Earth’s first colony ship finally reaches the target world. The excitement of planetfall is indescribable, but quickly transforms into sick disappointment when they find the atmosphere is a roiling mass of hydrochloric acid, carbon dioxide, and other deadly poisons. They fly onward, seeking better planets. They find them, but none are ideal. The search goes on for a century, then longer still. As they move farther from Earth, aliens discover the intruding ship, and they begin to investigate humanity. They find our species unacceptable.

En route to a job in the asteroid belt, the transport ship that Jonathan and Gaby are travelling on is required to give assistance to a space station in trouble. Astoria Station stopped responding to everything except automated messages. Jonathan and Gaby, familiar with disease and habitat collapse, offer to help. But not even they are prepared for what they find, or the efforts by some to sweep it under the carpet.

For the past five years, Ruma Nuway has been plotting, planning to leave Doonya, the human planet. Now's her chance. With the Misguided mercenary by her side, she stands guard over the bound Zrivisi crew and the alien ship at her complete disposal. The hard part is done. All she needs now are the launch codes from the Zrivisi captain before the bomb goes off. When the captain refuses, sending her Misguided companion past the edge, Ruma faces impossible choices.

Corta Hélio, one of the five family corporations that rule the moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed. The remaining Hélio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parents' violent deaths, is now a ward - virtually a hostage - of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished from the surface of the moon.

Stranded in a hellish alien desert, stripped of their strategic systems, quick reaction force and supporting arms, and carrying only a day's water ration, Marine Staff Sergeant Charlie Bass and his seven-man team faced a grim future 75 light-years from home.

Professor James Lowry didn’t believe in spirits, or witches, or demons. Not until a gentle spring evening when his hat disappeared, and suddenly he couldn’t remember the last four hours of his life. Now, the quiet university town of Atworthy is changing - slightly at first, then faster and more frighteningly each time he tries to remember.

Sol has fallen, but the fight continues to rage. Oberon stayed behind, nothing more than a ghost on a radar screen, watching as the Clicks increase their presence on planet Earth. What's going on with the humans left behind? No one knows. Humanity's fleet admiral has survived! And he's issuing orders. Oberon is sent on a mission where it must succeed or die trying. It isn't what any of the crew wants, but it is what they must do.

Ghost ship Impris, lost during the War of a Thousand Suns, is the stuff of legend. Her very name conjures the perils of interstellar travel. But no mere legend, she is real - glimpsed on occasion in the hyperdimensional Flux and then gone. Her passengers and crew live on in a strange limbo, their fate hopelessly caught up in quantum defects in space-time, interstellar piracy, and galactic coverup.

Years have passed since Earth encountered its first known interstellar object: Oumuamua. Now an even larger one has been discovered, following the exact same trajectory as its predecessor. Scientists around the world theorize that this can no longer be passed off as mere coincidence - the new contact must be an artificial construct of some kind.

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 first eight novellas of Blaze Ward's Science Officer series collected together for the first time!

Facing the threat of their dark enemies, Gillian must also cope with his inner turmoil, as the madness of his nature threatens to consume his life. He discovers that he is a genetically modified creature whose purpose is to serve the needs of others, and that the course of his destiny is not in his own hands.

The Primus, Vasilia Newling, is facing her worst nightmares. A revolution on Luna. Titan and the Asteroids abandoning the Solarian Union. Defections from within her own government. All because of those damned Cassidys! But she's still as ruthless as ever.

Far into the reaches of space, Anson Guthrie and a band of colonists have forged a new existence on Amaterasu not as physical beings but as downloaded consciousness watched over by the benevolent Life Mother. Yet as idyllic as their lives may be, back home on Earth the situation is growing grim.

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.

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.

Lem’s a mace-wielding teen space-ninja in a universe of sentient insectoids, purple jungles, and insane electromagnetic fields. She solves most problems by hitting harder, and never plays by her enemy's rules - until Jared Diebol captures her. Diebol is the rising leader of an army uniting the galaxy by force. He believes that the violent energy being Njande has “contaminated” Lem and her friends from another dimension to conquer the matter-based universe. Diebol’s army usually kills contaminated people - but he vows to cure Lem.

Kraken, the first colony of Earth - an Earth-twin that never suffered the dinosaur extinction meteor strike and subsequent entry into radical cycles of climate. A world that should have been paradise for those first colonists is on the brink of war...with its own motherland. Kraken citizens are split in their loyalty. Hostile acts against the colony by a desperate motherland are rising. Jankin Decatur takes a desperate peace mission to Earth to appeal to the NAU Senate on what may be their final hope for survival.