Space Opera First Contact

When a lab experiment results in a group of scientists gaining extremely long life, they realize that if they stay on Earth, they'll soon become lab specimens. To escape this, they decide to travel to the stars. Unfortunately, the stars are already occupied.

Earth's armed forces have stopped the Lanky advance and chased their ships out of the solar system, but for CDC officer Andrew Grayson, the war feels anything but won. On Mars, the grinding duty of flushing out the twenty-meter-tall alien invaders from their burrows underground is wearing down troops and equipment at an alarming rate. And for the remaining extrasolar colonies, the threat of a Lanky attack is ever present.

Humanity has been ravaged by alien war. Will the next encounter spell the end of mankind? Sixteen billion people died in the last alien invasion of the Alliance's colony worlds. When survey ship Captain Jeff Colgan discovers a new alien race, he's required to investigate. But what if the life form is as deadly as the Merkiaari? As the aliens discover Colgan's ship and begin to hunt him down, the captain's mission changes from one of study to one of survival.

Halmey Dz and her partner, Connla Kurucz, are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence - with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big - just once - to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.

The Devil's Heart is a legendary object of unsurpassed power and mystery. Worlds that believe in magic consider it Darkness's mightiest talisman; and worlds of science consider it a lost artifact of some ancient and forgotten race. Some say the Heart enables its possessor to control people's minds and to amass wealth enough for a dozen lifetimes, while others think it capable of raising the dead, perhaps even changing the flow of time itself. But to all, the location of this fabled object has remained a mystery, until now.

Binti has returned to her home planet, believing that the violence of the Meduse has been left behind. Unfortunately, although her people are peaceful on the whole, the same cannot be said for the Khoush, who fan the flames of their ancient rivalry with the Meduse.

A novella set in the hard-scrabble world of James S. A. Corey's NYT best-selling Expanse series, Strange Dogs follows a family of colonists on Laconia where a new generation of humanity struggles with the profound changes that come with making a home on an alien world. Like many before them, Cara and her family ventured through the gates as scientists and researchers, driven to carve out a new life and uncover the endless possibilities of the unexplored alien worlds now within reach.

Shifted by quantum entanglement from Earth to an alien planet, military contractor Zander Greaves and his squad would have to adapt—and quickly—if they wanted to live. As they tried to understand what was happening, the stark truth of their new reality thrust itself on the shaken humans. Giant machines of war were attacking an equally humongous bug. And, quite unfortunately, the giant bug had a lot of little friends.

Gnat the Devourer is becoming a more prominent figure in grand space politics. Sure, he may not be totally independent yet, but he has enough leeway to be able to differentiate Earth's interests from those of its Geckho suzerains and act exclusively for the good of his own kind. Gnat must balance obligations to his almighty suzerains against a desire to advance humanity's position in space, and his home planet's search for ever more allies.

Captain Picard has never encountered an opponent more powerful than Q, a being from another continuum who is dangerous, obnoxious, mysterious, and seemingly all-powerful. But now, Trelane has tapped in to an awesome power source that makes him more powerful than the entire continuum. Q warns that Trelane has become unspeakably dangerous - this time the stakes are all of creation. Read by John de Lancie.

The Tyrell are a race that love to fight. The more difficult the fight, the better they like it. Every race they find is given the same level of technology and a specific amount of time to exploit it before the Tyrell come back looking for a fight. Humanity is warned by another alien species that the Tyrell are coming, and the race is on to build an Alliance of races strong enough to stand up against an empire whose expansion has been relentless.

"Resistance is futile." The greatest threat the Federation has ever faced is the half organic, half mechanical Borg. Now more dangerous than ever, the Borg threatens the Federation's past, present, and future. Read by Gates McFadden, "Beverly Crusher" on Star Trek, The Next Generation!

Ursula has lived twice the normal human lifespan, courtesy of the latest technology. But now she’s struggling to find excitement and purpose, so signs up to the Polity’s military. She excels in weapons development, and progresses rapidly up the ranks. But after botching a powerful new ammunition test, she’s dismissed from service. Hunting for a simpler, more meaningful existence, the ex-soldier heads for the stars. And after founding a colony on the hostile planet of Threpsis, Ursula finally feels alive.

Vor knapp einem Jahrhundert hat sich die Galaxis entzweit - ein Krieg löschte beinahe sämtliches Leben aus. In der Folge erfand man eine gemeinschaftsbildende Tradition: Etwas Schönes und Unterhaltsames, um den Frieden, die Liebe und das Leben zu feiern. Und so wurde der metagalaktische Grand Prix geboren, in dem alle empfindungsfähigen Zivilisationen friedlich gegeneinander antreten. Seitdem muss jede neue Spezies, die Mitglied der kosmischen Gemeinschaft werden will, an der Show teilnehmen.

CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson has been loaned out to a CDF platoon tasked with secretly removing an unauthorized colony of humans on an alien world. Colonial Ambassador Abumwe has been ordered to participate in final negotiations with an alien race the Union hopes to make allies. Wilson and Abumwe’s missions are fated to cross - and in doing so, place both missions at risk of failure.

We Only Need the Heads is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division.

Spock's mother, Amanda Grayson, is dying, and Spock returns to the planet Vulcan where he and Sarek enjoy a rare moment of rapprochement. But just as his wife's illness grows worse, duty calls Sarek away, once again sowing the seeds of conflict between father and son. Yet soon Sarek and Spock must put aside their differences and work together to foil a far-reaching plot to destroy the Federation, a plot that Sarek has seen in the making for nearly his entire career.

In a new Cold War between Earth and the colonies on Mars, when devastating weapons go missing, there's only one team you can call - the Outriders. A crack force of highly specialized super-soldiers, their clone bodies are near-immortal. When a fully-autonomous vessel with orbital strike capabilities goes missing, it's up to the Outriders to track the un-trackable. But when the trail leads them to the influential Martian People's Collective Republic, the operation gets a lot more complicated.

Hudson Powell had always been a drifter, but after his father died, he vowed to turn his life around. He quit freelancing as a starship pilot and joined the Relic Guardian Force as a 38-year-old rookie. That was a big mistake. The RGF police the alien wrecks that have been found on every portal world discovered in the last century. They make sure the relic hunters pay taxes on the priceless alien tech they scavenge from the hulks. The snag is that the RGF is corrupt. And Hudson’s training officer Logan Griff is the worst scumbag of the lot.

After Sol’s construction of Tridents - Omnian-designed warships - Earthers possess the ability to transit quickly among the stars. The desire to know what happened to Earth’s colony ship, the Honora Belle, sent to the stars a millennium ago is resurrected. An Omnian Trident and the vessel Rêveur accompany three Sol Enclave Tridents in search of the Belle’s colonists. Swiftly, the Omnians and the Earthers become enmeshed in a centuries-old conflict enveloping a vast area of space inhabited by alliance races. The enemy is the Colony: a giant insectoid species.

On Earth, the moratorium on mercenary contracts is disrupting Jim Cartwright’s efforts to stand up the new Terran Federation. Making matters worse, Jim has received intelligence that someone is squatting on asteroids in our Solar System...and Sansar Enkh is pretty sure they don’t have Earth’s best interests in mind. Fearing the aliens have plans for another invasion - or worse - Jim takes his ship, Bucephalus, and sets off to investigate.