Hard Space Opera

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.

It began at the dawn of history, when a darkness rose from deep within an Egyptian tomb. For thousands of years - long before earth was plunged into an intergalactic battle for its survival - four deathless creatures sowed seeds of destruction and chaos. Surviving on the spilled blood of warriors and innocents from ancient Greece to the ashes of Nazi Germany, the creatures have played a role in conflicts great and small.

Provenance: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned. Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future, her family, and her world.

Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, only a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, Killeen and his child, Toby, of the Bishop Tribe, are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling “mechs”. Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity – neither organic nor cybernetic or living matter – reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen.

The revelations on Mars - a half-million year-old legacy of the vanished star-traveling Builders - have fed the flames of catastrophic war. A beleaguered United States and its Russian and Japanese allies struggle to hold their own against the indomitable forces of the enemy United Nations. The bloody conflict that has swept over the home planet now rages across the blackness of space - with the U.S. Marine Corps in the vanguard, leading the charge as always.

This prequel to the Trade Pact Universe series begins in a time before the Clan had learned how to manipulate the M'hir to travel between worlds. Aliens have begun to explore the world of Cersi, upsetting the delicate balance between the Clan and the two other powerful races who coexist by set rules. And one young woman is on the verge of finding the forbidden secret of the M'hir - a discovery that could prove the salvation or ruin of her entire species.

When humanity reaches for the stars, our probes are destroyed. They crash into an incredibly advanced piece of technology: a massive force-field. Unknown beings have placed a barrier around our star and planets, enclosing us within. We’re locked inside a Great Sphere. Was this invisible obstacle built to imprison us - or to protect us? No one knows the truth, but it soon becomes clear the barrier has leaks. Aliens infiltrate and try to sabotage our efforts to escape our cage.

The Ixa smashed the galaxy to bits before they were defeated. Captain Husher has sounded the alarm in the decades since: the Ixa’s creators will return to finish the job. But unlike Husher, the galactic government didn't battle the Ixa, and the politicians have convinced themselves that maintaining peace means limiting the ability to wage war.

Senior co-administrator of the Norcoast Salmon Research Facility, Dr. Mackenzie Connor was a biologist who studied the spawning habits of salmon. Then, last season, just as she and Dr. Emily Mamani were starting their research, they were interrupted by the arrival of Brymm, the first Dhryn to set foot on Earth. And suddenly everything changed for Mac, Emily, Brymn, the human race, and all the member races of the Interspecies Union. Base was attacked, Em was kidnapped by the mysterious Ro, and Mac and brymn had to flee for their lives to the Dhryn home world.

Five thousand years in the future, humankind has spread across thousands of worlds, and more than a dozen different governments exist in an uneasy truce. But human beings have found no signs of other life anywhere approaching human intelligence. This changes when scientists discover a sunless planet they name Danann, traveling the void just beyond the edge of the galaxy at such a high speed that it cannot be natural. Its continents and oceans have been sculpted and shaped, with but a single megaplex upon it - close to perfectly preserved.

On a far-future Earth, a linked system of artificial intelligences called the cybercosm runs the planet and the universe far more efficiently than any flesh and blood ruler ever could, in essence rendering the human race obsolete. On the Earth's moon, genetically engineered Lunarians carrying the DNA of Dagney Beynac - a descendant of the legendary Anton Guthrie, founder of the powerful and visionary Fireball Enterprises - struggle to preserve their lives, their freedom, and their satellite's resources in the face of threats posed by encroaching humans and controlling machines.

Commander Scott McNabb, of the science vessel Hermes, is three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt. It’s an excruciatingly dull mission, yet it keeps him far away from the agencies that are chasing him down. However, his fortunes change, along with the other four crew members, when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. Scott’s share of the salvage would be enough to clear his name and start a new life.

Devastated early in the war, the United Systems Alliance has retaken several key systems lost to the Galactic Union. But getting even isn’t good enough for General Hella. Determined to end the costly war and destroy the Union, Hella launches a daring offensive against the planet Kuut, a key military base deep in Union space. At the tip of the spear, Lieutenant Mark Rizer and the Marines of Orcus Company find themselves in the mud and blood of a planetary ground invasion.

The cryosleep chambers are beginning to fail. Surveillance of Hocklyn space has revealed that the Hocklyns are thirty years ahead of their projected schedule and will soon reach human occupied space. War could break out any day if something isn't done. The human leaders suggest a daring plan to buy them the additional time they need to strengthen the Fleet, as well as the defenses protecting their worlds.

Trapped on an alternate Earth, the combined crews of a crashed Russian spaceship, a British expeditionary force and a group of strays from the future must work together to survive, escape and discover what led them to this point. All are from parallel universes where small changes in history led to different realities, and the tensions between the groups are rising.

The game never changes, only the players do. Others might call it rebellion, call it cowardice. The vanguard will not forgive, nor will they forget. Their trust lays with one another, in those that have shed blood with them and joined the net. Empires, government, leaders, alliances, planets, corporations - many have fallen in humanities past. Now a new Empire will stand on the shoulders of the vanguard, the troopers, the people of Tricticus, and the Victor Corporation. Their goal: survive, and defend those they care for by any means necessary.

During a classified mission to the ISS, astronaut Jack Kildare picks up an eerie signal. An alien spaceship is orbiting distant, icy Europa. It looks derelict...but is it? As fear sweeps across Earth, NASA spearheads a frenzied effort to build a ship capable of traveling to Jupiter to confront the alien menace. Technology intertwines with espionage and sabotage in a race against the clock. Fighting for his rightful place in the mission, Jack finds himself submerged in a world of secrets, international power games, and cold-blooded murder.

A huge space station orbits the Earth, holding the last of humanity. It's broken, rusted, falling apart. We've wrecked our planet, and now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that's dirty, overcrowded, and inescapable. What's more, there's a madman hiding on the station. He's about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there'll be nowhere left to run.

In the aftermath of the cold-blooded assassinations that killed her parents and shattered the Vatta intersteller shipping empire, Kylara Vatta sets out to avenge the killings and salvage the family business. Ky soon discovers a conspiracy of terrifying scope, breathtaking audacity, and utter ruthlessness. The only hope against such powerful evil is for all the space merchants to band together. Unfortunately, because she commands a ship that once belonged to a notorious pirate, Ky is met with suspicion, if not outright hostility...even from her own cousin.

After the mysterious discovery of an alien mech inside a comet, Darkstream Security has finally completed its own design. They assign Chief Gabriel Roach with the task of whittling down hundreds of bright young recruits to form a team of elite mech pilots, which he will command. Their mission: protect human colonies from the almighty Quatro. A single Quatro can take down an entire squad of traditional soldiers. But Roach is the perfect one for the job.