Hard Science Fiction Space Opera

Commanders from six Star Trek crews are faced with the ultimate gamble, as they hurl themselves through a Gateway without any knowledge of what lay beyond. Each faces a personally unique challenge, struggling to find a way back to the ships and homes they left behind. Waiting behind at least one of the Gateways are the ageless Iconians, the primordial architects of the mysterious portals causing chaos throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Nikaela Vreekande joins Kristdokar's clandestine operation to identify those responsible for the tragedy on Novalis III and the incident on Reisenar. Lieutenant Colonel Katrine Primatov meets with Thordahl and Brynjar on Norandyne to establish covert lines of communication between the Kelk Supremacy and the Commonwealth. John Mathius travels to Trafalgar to attend O-School. All seems well, but there are those in the Commonwealth and the Supremacy who would prefer that John and Nikaela fail, or barring that, they would see them dead.

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.

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.

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.

In a future where humanity has scattered itself across the stars and Earth itself is now a dimly remembered place of legend, two worlds of near-supernatural strangeness challenge two naive but courageous heroes.

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.

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.

Xeno City, a cross roads in a sprawling multi-species galaxy, is also a city brimming with greed, corruption and murder. Wading through this murky cesspool is J. Azize "Jazz" Singer. A private detective pursuing an honest, or not so honest, buck. When Jazz is told of the death of his childhood friend, Erta L’Hotzuma, a death the local law fails to investigate, he sets out to find out who is responsible and why. His investigation, however, soon meets strong and violent resistance and he begins to suspect he has stumbled onto something bigger than just the death of a friend.

Orson Scott Card, Kevin J. Anderson, and Larry Niven have seen the future. Now you can, too. A constellation of the brightest lights in the science fiction and fantasy firmament have judged these authors to be the best, the brightest, the truest emerging stars in the field.

The lost battle of Terra Nova has shown even the biggest skeptics how serious the alien threat really is. The power blocs of the solar system unite for one last cataclysmic showdown. Meanwhile, an unlikely trio races against time to prevent the conflict from reaching Earth. Tsai Yini, the tachyon chronicler, is hoping for help from her father, who has survived a hundred-year journey and seems to have a special relationship with the attackers.

Tanis Richards, commander of the TSS Kirby Jones and her crew are at the tail end of a long patrol on the fringes of the Terran Hegemony when they come across a freighter suspected of smuggling goods out of InnerSol. The Norse Wind looks like just another dumpy cargo ship hauling goods across the Sol System, but someone up the chain thinks the vessel is worth looking into. Tanis and her boarding team gear up for another routine inspection that turns into anything but as the two crews struggle for supremacy out in the cold dark between worlds.

A wave of death is spreading through the Milky Way galaxy, an expanding sphere of lethal gamma radiation that erupted from the galaxy's core 28,000 years ago. Every world it touched was wiped clean of all life. But it's possible to protect a planet from gamma radiation. Now, guided by the ancient intelligent machines called the Predecessors, men and women from Earth seek out those precious, rare worlds that harbor intelligent species, determined to save them.

When John Bandicut sets out across the surface of Triton, he's hardly ready for the storm of chaos that's about to blow through his life. The alien Quarx that soon inhabits his mind is humanity's first contact with an alien life. The Quarx, part of an ancient galactic civilization that manipulates chaos theory to predict catastrophic events, seeks to prevent a cometary collision that could destroy the Earth. But it must have help. If Bandicut chooses to trust the Quarx, he must break all the rules - indeed, sacrifice his own life.

This star system is burning down. Seaman Jake Price's "betters" have failed the people of the Steele System, so he's taking matters into his own hands. Darkstream has tricked the public into believing the Quatro are the enemy, but the company has already sold the system's security to the true enemy: the Progenitors. Now, Jake is calling on everyone who remembers what it means to fight out of duty instead of money. If they can't stop Darkstream in time, the system will burn.

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.

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.

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.

Captain Sass Collier steers her motley crew across the treacherous planetary rings, seeking solutions to the steady health decline of Mahina Colony. Tantalizing clues point to Sagamore, Mahina’s sister moon. To get there, Sass needs to upgrade her vintage skyship to a spaceship. Her crew's would-be heroes need to earn their space legs. And ex-cop Sass is probably the wrong person for the job.

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