Space Science Exploration

Hiro blew them all away—literally—on his mercenary job clearing out a space pirate stronghold. Now, the military and a ton of smaller groups are all desperate to recruit him. Not only that, but a major biotech firm is salivating over his otherworldly DNA! All Hiro wants is to keep flying free with his beautiful companions, but how long can he dodge all the people who want to tie him down?

Look outward beyond the stars with six stories from bestselling visionary authors. An AI awakens to its purpose. A researcher seeds a thousand new worlds for one more chance at love. A murder rocks the crew of an interstellar ship. With a sweeping sense of wonder, these stories explore the galaxy . . . and the horizons of humanity’s potential.

L'espèce humaine s'est déployée parmi les étoiles, établissant des colonies sur de nombreux mondes, tandis que des clans gitans indépendants, les Vagabonds, gèrent de gigantesques stations d'écopage volantes au milieu des nuages. Sur la planète Theroc, la capitale de la Confédération, les humains vivent dans une monumentale forêt dont les arbres démesurés sont tous interconnectés au sein d'un esprit unique.

Awash with loss and surrounded by enemies, Van and his crew are faced with the same challenge Mark Tudor dealt with decades earlier. Does Van accept the crown and become a Master?

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.

Damien Montgomery is as much a nobody as a Mage of the star-spanning Protectorate of Mars can be. Trained as a Jump Mage, one of the elite who teleport ships across interstellar space, he lacks the connections to find a ship that will take him. Until pirates and politics strand Captain David White of the jump freighter Blue Jayin his home system. The two men's matching needs birth a choice and a partnership that will take them from high-end orbitals to prisons to alien graveyards in forgotten star systems.

Each primarch is an exemplary being, derived from the Emperor’s own genetic stock to embody a facet of His personality. Their powers are unfathomable, but only one of them is the First. Lion El’Jonson is the paragon of what it is to be a primarch. His Legion, pre-eminent for most of their long history, typify the virtues of temperance, pride and martial excellency that the Lion embodies. They are the Emperor’s last line and final sanction. They are His Dark Angels.

When itinerant cave diver James Tighe receives an invitation to billionaire Nathan Joyce's private island, he thinks it must be a mistake. But Tighe's unique skill set makes him a prime candidate for Joyce's high-risk venture to mine a near-Earth asteroid - with the goal of kick-starting an entire off-world economy. The potential rewards and personal risks are staggering, but the competition is fierce, and the stakes couldn't be higher. Isolated and pushed beyond their breaking points, Tighe and his fellow 21st-century adventurers must rely on each other to survive....

The Ship fled a dying Earth to save the human race. Launched as the last gasp of humanity, the Ship set out to preserve the species by seeding the universe with one billion colonists. Generations of crew, trained to be either flight or marines, have spent 5,000 years protecting the Ship and its civilian cargo from the constant threat of alien violence. Fifteen-year-old Zax has always had trouble fitting in with the other cadets, but he's finally on the cusp of attaining his dream and gaining entrance to the Pilot Academy.

Mysterious gateways are appearing throughout the universe, bridging violent civilizations, leading to war, and sowing chaos. While some species succumb to the pandemonium, the Chut’un forge an unholy symbiotic relationship—The Order—with red Europhids, a vast hive intelligence populating the universe’s far reaches. Desiring structure and fearing the unknown, they cull everything opposed to their plan, including the Europhids’ blue counterparts, carrying out a galactic genocide until only one blue Europhid remains...inside Moses Montgomery, a.k.a. "Dark Horse".

When Van gains rank as a Peacemaker, he becomes a bigger target for the criminals scattered among the stars. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. On a distant world under an alien sun, hunters and their companions—the Rovan—bond in a ritual as old as their civilization. But one of the hunters is missing, and Van, along with his growing crew, knows where to look. Climbing up into the rarified air of the super-rich, Van uncovers a new enemy: The Fade. And they are as cruel as the stars are many.

Hiro and the gang get dragged into rescuing the daughters of an elf patriarch and receive a warm welcome from the elven home planet. The elves here are nothing like Hiro imagined--they know nothing of modern science and rely on magic rather than technology. As Hiro and the girls sample local delicacies, enjoy the sights, and get a crash course in elven fashion, they find that Hiro seems to wield a power much like the elves' magic...

In the 1800s, a sailing ship crashes off the coast of Norway. In the 1900s, a Zepellin explores an icy canyon in Antarctica. In the far future, a spaceship sets out for an alien artifact. Each excursion goes horribly wrong. And on every journey, Dr. Silas Coade is the physician, but only Silas seems to realize that these events keep repeating themselves. And it's up to him to figure out why and how. And how to stop it all from happening again.

The human race is running out of time on overcrowded Earth, and only one man has the courage to do what is necessary to save it. Colony ship Ark is the greatest project the human race will ever attempt, a self-contained world 100 years in the building, launched on a 10,000-year voyage to carry the seeds of civilization to the stars. It is humanity's final gamble for escape from a desperate world, but the price of hope is measured in lives.

Null Stellarium is more than a shipyard. It's a proving ground steeped with science and engineering designed to push warships faster than ever before, and armed to confront the growing menace of a universe where everything is influenced by a hidden evil. As Van and his crew grow into their new roles, Perry unlocks a memory that reaches into the very beginning of the Tudor family's service nearly a century earlier. But sometimes, the truth is hidden for a reason, and Van must decide—How much does he really want to know? And how far can he take his ship, knowing there's a price on his head?

Retired from his fighting days, John Perry is now village ombudsman for a human colony on distant Huckleberry. With his wife, former Special Forces warrior Jane Sagan, he farms several acres, adjudicates local disputes, and enjoys watching his adopted daughter grow up. That is, until his and Jane's past reaches out to bring them back into the game — as leaders of a new human colony, to be peopled by settlers from all the major human worlds, for a deep political purpose that will put Perry and Sagan back in the thick of interstellar politics, betrayal, and war.

Ten years have passed on Tines World, where Ravna Bergnsdot and a number of human children ended up after a disaster that nearly obliterated humankind throughout the galaxy. Ravna and the pack animals for which the planet is named have survived a war, and Ravna has saved more than one hundred children who were in cold-sleep aboard the vessel that brought them. While there is peace among the Tines, there are those among them - and among the humans - who seek power. And no matter the cost, these malcontents are determined to overturn the fledgling civilization....

Ten thousand city-state habitats orbit the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise. But even utopia needs a police force. For the citizens of the Glitter Band that organization is Panoply, and the prefects are its operatives. Prefect Tom Dreyfus has a new emergency on his hands. Across the habitats and their hundred million citizens, people are dying suddenly and randomly, victims of a bizarre and unprecedented malfunction of their neural implants.

On the Ark, a colonyship bound outward across the stars, not everyone is a volunteer - or even human. Lovelock is a capuchin monkey engineered from conception to be the perfect servant: intelligent, agile, and devoted to his owner. He is a "witness", privileged to spend his days and nights recording the life of one of Earth’s most brilliant scientists via digital devices implanted behind his eyes. But Lovelock is something special among witnesses. He’s a little smarter than most humans: smart enough to break through some of his conditioning, smart enough to feel the bonds of slavery - and want freedom.

After their showstopping defeat of the crystal life-forms, Hiro and the gang head to the imperial capital for Hiro's award ceremony. No shortage of trouble awaits them in the heart of the empire, from Elma's overly affectionate brother crashing the party, to a reunion with Chris, to the emperor liking Hiro a little too much. Just when the crew thinks they've seen it all, they learn that the imperial princess...is the spitting image of Mimi?!