Space Opera First Contact

You've heard of him. He's Adam Cain, the alien with an attitude. Now he's back...in a series of new adventures as a badass human, showing the galaxy who's the boss. Accompanied by his buddies Riyad Tarazi and Sherri Valentine, Adam is struggling to make ends meet on a distant tropical world running Capt. Cain's Bar & Grill. The problem: They picked the worst place in the galaxy to run a legitimate business...smack dab in the middle of lawless Dead Zone. Comprised of a hundred dead worlds, The Zone is a gold-rush-like region of salvagers, pirates, and scoundrels.

Samantha was badass even before she learned magic. Fending for herself in the cauldron of a planet torn apart by an alien invasion taught Samantha how to kill. Ruthlessly efficient, her abilities have caught the attention of the Shadow Corps. A group comprised of deadly warriors who focus on galactic safety, using any means necessary. Her first mission puts her team up against a space dragon, death reapers, and the ultimate sorcerer. Samantha had better learn to master her alien magic, or be forced to watch her world, and many others, burn.

Zack Lightman has never much cared for reality. He vastly prefers the countless science-fiction movies, books, and videogames he's spent his life consuming. And too often, he catches himself wishing that some fantastic, impossible, world-altering event could arrive to whisk him off on a grand spacefaring adventure.

On a little-known planet, Archmage Varic Vallenar casts a grand spell to empower himself with the magical abilities of his alternate selves. The ritual works too well, granting Varic not only the magic but also the memories from six lives. Including their gruesome deaths. Now, Varic has power greater than any wizard in galactic history, but he knows that won’t be enough. The enemies he faced in those alternate lives were apocalyptic in scale. Terrors of technology and magic. Nothing that he, or anyone, can defeat.

On Mars, a scientist experiments with a new engine that will one day become the drive that fuels humanity's journey into the stars. On an asteroid station, a group of prisoners are oblivious to the catastrophe that awaits them. On a future Earth beset by overpopulation, pollution, and poverty, a crime boss desperately seeks to find a way off planet. On an alien world, a human family struggles to establish a colony and make a new home. All these stories and more are featured in this unmissable collection of short fiction set in the hardscrabble world of The Expanse.

It is the year 12,020 GE and Emperor Cleon I sits uneasily on the Imperial throne of Trantor. Here in the great multidomed capital of the Galactic Empire, 40 billion people have created a civilization of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. Yet Cleon knows there are those who would see him fall - those whom he would destroy if only he could read the future.

Fleeing Earth after an alien invasion, the human race stands on the threshold of evolution. Their new home is Luna, a moon colony blessed with creature comforts, prolonged lifespans, digital memories, and instant sex changes. But the people of Luna are bored, restless, suicidal - and so is the computer that monitors their existence.

Ethan Bryant was supposed to fall asleep on a ship leaving Earth and wake up 50 years later with his family on the planet Minea. Instead, after the ship's caretaker - the lone human in charge of monitoring the ship's vital systems - suddenly died, the ship's computer locked Ethan out of his stasis chamber and gave him the job. That was five years ago. Five years of checking to make sure everything ran smoothly on a ship Ethan knows almost nothing about.

The Sa’Nerra were close to defeat, then everything changed. Armed with a neural weapon, the brutal alien warriors turned Fleet crew against their own. Entire warships went rogue. Suspicion and fear ran riot. Surrender seemed like the only option. But Lucas Sterling knows that in the fight against the Sa’Nerra there is only victory or death.

Pyre's humans suffer multiple cultural shocks. They discovered the Messinants dome, an ancient construction that houses a quantum-coupled gate. More shocking, they find that sentient alien races utilize a network of these domes to journey between their far distant worlds in pursuit of alliance matters. If humans wish to join this elite collection of sentients, they must contribute significantly in trade, tech, or something of equal value.

Nearly 100 years before the events of Orson Scott Card's bestselling novel Ender's Game, humans were just beginning to step off Earth and out into the Solar System. A thin web of ships in both asteroid belts; a few stations; a corporate settlement on Luna. No one had seen any sign of other space-faring races; everyone expected that First Contact, if it came, would happen in the future, in the empty reaches between the stars. Then a young navigator on a distant mining ship saw something moving too fast, heading directly for our sun.

Colton Beck has six months to live. He works for the Angor near Los Angeles, aware that any day could be his last. The Angor arrived 20 years ago, resolved to help mankind survive, but not everyone believes their motives are honorable. When the Angor offer humanity a colony world, Colton is determined to see another planet before his final breath. He’s been diagnosed with Xeno, a rare disorder that surfaced with the Angor’s arrival, but he won’t let this stop him.

The lines. No ship can traverse the void without them. Only linesmen can work with them. But only Ean Lambert hears their song. And everyone thinks he's crazy.... Most slum kids never go far, certainly not becoming a level 10 linesman like Ean. Even if he's part of a small and unethical cartel, and the other linesmen disdain his self-taught methods, he's certified and working. Then a mysterious alien ship is discovered at the edges of the galaxy.

In the year AD 3000, Earth is a dystopian wasteland, plundered of its natural resources by alien conquerors known as Psychlos. Fewer than 35,000 humans survive in a handful of communities scattered across the face of a post-apocalyptic Earth. From the ashes of humanity rises a young hero, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. Setting off on an initial quest to discover a hidden evil, Jonnie unlocks the mystery of humanity’s demise and unearths a crucial weakness in their oppressors.

Commander Dalton Reeves is a maverick officer with exceptional genetic strength and a dark family history—a history that will come back to haunt him. Punished for exceeding orders one time too many, he’s packed off to the "The Abyss"—the most dangerous space station in the galaxy. But a posting that should have led to five years in obscurity will propel Reeves into the center of an interstellar war against a long-forgotten alien adversary with a bitter grudge.

For small-time street hustler Cam Alvarez, the choice is simple. He has no family, no friends, no place in the world...nothing to lose. When his latest con results in the death of a cartel hitman, Cam opts to join the Marines and leave Earth to fight a vicious alien enemy.

It's been over a year since the System came to Earth, bringing blood and monsters in equal measure. Having left Whitehorse, John and his team travel down to British Columbia, running into new dangers from aliens and humans alike. Faced with new challenges and new enemies, John and his friends seek to free human settlements from Galactic control in North America.

A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials.

Years after defeating aliens bent on burning down the galaxy, the Interstellar Union is breaking apart, its member species undermining each other at every opportunity. When an interdimensional distress signal arrives, only humanity is interested in helping. Captain Vin Husher is given command of the UHS Relentless, and sent in as part of a carrier strike group...right into a trap laid by humanity’s old enemy. Surrounded by a bioengineered super-species and unable to return home, Husher must draw on decades of experience just to keep his people alive.

As part of the fabled S4, Lance Warder is stationed on Mars when first contact is made. The Galio have arrived. Lance is selected to act as diplomatic security and all appears to be going well between the two species until a radical group known only as the Veles rear its ugly head and decide conflict must follow.