It all started with the geese. The Firefly crew is eager to get paid for their latest job, but when payment arrives as a gaggle of geese instead of a purse, their stay on the planet Brome gets an indefinite extension. Don’t matter that the geese will fetch a pretty penny once they get somewhere to sell them. Without coin, they can’t buy fuel, and without fuel, they can’t get offworld. Serenity is stuck.

The Battle of Serenity Valley was the turning point that led the Independents to their defeat at the hands of the Alliance. Yet the Browncoats had held the valley for weeks against all odds, before being ordered to lay down their arms. Command stated they refused to send in airpower because the ground war was "too hot". But the soldiers who were there insist that was not true.... While picking up a new cargo on Persephone, Captain Malcolm Reynolds is kidnapped by a bunch of embittered veteran Browncoats who suspect him of sabotaging the Independents during the war.

Captain Mal Reynolds is in a fix. He’d like nothing more than to find honest smuggling work that stays under the Alliance’s radar and keeps the good ship Serenity in the sky. But when an old flame of Jayne Cobb’s sends a desperate plea across the galaxy, his crew has other ideas. On the arid, far-flung world of Thetis, the terrifying Elias Vandal is threatening to overrun the town of Coogan’s Bluff with his trigger-happy army. He wants control of the only thing standing between its people and dustbowl ruin: their water supply.

It is an age of exploration. Jedi travel the galaxy, expanding their understanding of the Force and all the worlds and beings connected by it. Meanwhile, the Republic, led by its two chancellors, works to unite worlds in an ever-growing community among near and distant stars. On the close-orbiting planets of Eiram and E’ronoh, the growing pains of a galaxy with limited resources but unlimited ambition are felt keenly. The two worlds’ hatred for each other has fueled half a decade of escalating conflict and now threatens to consume surrounding systems.

After discovering a cache of Prothean technology on Mars in 2148, humanity is spreading to the stars---the newest interstellar species, struggling to carve out its place in the greater galactic community. On the edge of colonized space, ship commander and Alliance war hero David Anderson investigates the remains of a top secret military research station---smoking ruins littered with bodies and unanswered questions. Who attacked this post, and for what purpose?