Hard Science Fiction Space Opera

The Year is 2040. The Marines have landed on Mars to guard the unearthed secrets of an ancient and dangerous alien race: Ourselves. Scientists have discovered something astonishing in the subterranean ruins of a sprawling Martian city: startling evidence of an alternative history that threatens to split humanity into opposing factions and plunge the Earth into chaos and war.

For John Bandicut, Earth is but a memory. Stranded at the edge of the galaxy in a structure populated with beings from a thousand worlds, Bandicut finds unexpected friends...only to be caught up in a cascade of forces that threaten the Shipworld itself. Confronting an entity known as the "boojum", Bandicut discovers greater peril than ever in his journey into the unknown.

Rika's demons have been put to rest, and she's been given command of a new company within the Marauders: a company composed entirely of mechs. Now it's time to deliver unprecedented levels of ass kicking to Nietzschean Empire.

Captain Graciela is where she wants to be, far from her controlling mother, in a rented solar sail cargo ship, trading and gambling throughout the heliosphere. It can be lonely in the void, but the crew on the H2LiftShip, the LunaCola, is all the help she needs: Jack, a talking dog with a nose for Earth jerky, Tang, a poker-obsessed orangutan, and Octopus, in his watery navigation station, are her constant companions on her journey.

General Keith Brennan would rather face an army with his trusty rifle than attend another state dinner. When the president of the solar system is assassinated on Mars, Brennan is the obvious choice to investigate. If he comes up with the wrong answer, though, his career will be over.

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.

The most wanted salvage marine in the universe thought he was done fighting. For Samuel Hyst the nightmare was over, left behind upon dead worlds and within the derelict ships drifting through space, he and his family having fled to the edges of the frontier to begin a new life of peace. In the aftermath of a violent raid by slave traders, the long-suffering marine discovers that a relic of the ancient machine civilization has been left at the doorstep of his pristine forest homestead. He feels the menace radiating from it, and knows that the various powers and factions that rule necrospace will soon come for all of them.

For First Trooper Erik and his comrades the eternal war against the Helos is the only life they know. Across a hundred worlds and against a dozen alien species they have fought and been victorious. Now Erik's past threatens to destroy everything he believes in. Leading his squad into a war-torn Hell, the living legend faces his greatest battle. Victory or extinction is the only outcome because Erik and his squad are Hard Corps.

Jon Grebbel arrives on the colony world of Janus, and finds himself without memory of his life on Earth. He meets Elinda, an earlier arrival, whose lover, Barbara, vanished and then was found lying in the woods, apparently brain-damaged. Elinda has also lost her memories of Earth. Investigating Barbara's fate and their own, the two find their love and their search for justice turning toward bitter self-discovery and revenge, even as they begin to uncover the darkness at the heart of their world.

Melati escaped New Jakarta Space Station when it fell into Allion's hands. Her family was left behind the enemy lines. She signed up for active duty with the International Space Force in the hope they would liberate the station. Instead, they chose to maintain a crippling siege that has lasted for 10 months.

Barcus is a working stiff looking for a good paycheck. When the Ventura and its crew enter orbit for a scheduled planet survey, the ship activates an automated defense system protecting the planet. Although the Ventura is destroyed in the attack, Barcus alone survives the harrowing fall to the remote planet surface. He struggles to remain alive and sane and to discover why everyone he knew and loved on the Ventura was deliberately murdered.

When the miners on Mars form a trade union and call a planet wide strike, the president of the Council of Economic Unions orders the federal forces on Mars to take a firm hand.

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.

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

When a shipwrecked stranger washed up on the beach near research scientist Samantha Bryton's home, she was unaware that he was something more than human. He said his name was Turner Pascal - but Pascal was dead, killed in a car wreck. This man only held the remainder of Pascal's consciousness in a technologically enhanced humanoid body.

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.

Siouca is a member of the advanced Wanderer civilization. What does Siouca want? The quest to unlock the secrets of interstellar travel leads a Roranian crew on an epic journey across space. Saved by a dying machine-lect, stranded in a failing ship, faced with an ultimate choice. Were they too eager in their attempts to reach the stars? The fractious Primals are the ancient, all-powerful rulers of the Creatites. Their origins are shrouded in mystery although Storytellers recite their legends.

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.

Hope ran deep when Smith left humanity’s first generation ship to lay roots with his wife and son in the open air of a new planet. When the colony ship broke apart on entry, however, countless lives were lost, including Smith’s beloved wife. He now fights to keep his son and his colony alive, all the while fighting off alien-induced hallucinations. Meanwhile, Smith’s apprentice Tashon seeks to discover what happened to his beloved mentor and the colony. He soon learns that the expedition’s leaders are focused on a much more imminent danger.

The colony ship Ragtime docks in the Lagos system, having traveled light-years to bring one thousand sleeping souls to a new home among the stars. But when first mate Michelle Campion rouses, she discovers some of the sleepers will never wake. Answering Campion’s distress call, investigator Rasheed Fin is tasked with finding out who is responsible for these deaths.