Fantasy First Contact

Having magical powers makes you less than human, a resource to be exploited. Half-unicorn Gary Cobalt is sick of slavery, captivity, and his horn being ground down to power faster-than-light travel. When he's finally free, all he wants is to run away in his ancestors' stone ship. Instead, Captain Jenny Perata steals the ship out from under him so she can make an urgent delivery. But Jenny held him captive for a decade, and then Gary murdered her best friend...who was also the wife of her copilot, Cowboy Jim. What could possibly go right?

The West has been devastated by epidemics, bio-terrorism, war, and famine. Asia has shut its borders to keep the threats at bay, and some with power and influence have already abandoned Earth. Now an escape route a century in the making - the Nomad mission - finally offers hope to a small town and a secret research centre hidden in a rural American backwater. Shrouded in lies and concealed even from the research centre's staff, Nomad is about to fulfil its long-dead founder's vision of preserving the best of humanity to forge a new future. But who decides who's worthy?

Naira and Tarquin have escaped vicious counter-revolutionaries, misprinted monsters, and the pull of a dying planet. Now, bound together to find the truth behind the blight that has been killing habitable planets, they need to hunt out the Mercator family secrets. But, when the head of Mercator disappears, taking the universe’s remaining supply of starship fuel with him, chaos breaks loose between the ruling families. Naira’s revolution must be put aside for the sake of humanity’s immediate survival.

Rosalyn Devar is on the run from her famous family, the bioengineering job she's come to hate, and her messed-up life. She's run all the way to outer space, where she's taken a position as a "space janitor", cleaning up ill-fated research expeditions. But no matter how far she goes, Rosalyn can't escape herself. After too many mistakes on the job, she's given one last chance: take care of salvaging the Brigantine, a research vessel that has gone dark, with all crew aboard thought dead. But the Brigantine's crew are very much alive - if not entirely human.

Get the Earth's Last Gambit bundle, featuring all four books in this first-contact series blending hard sci-fi and edge-of-your-seat action.

Sally Jansen was NASA's leading astronaut, until a mission to Mars ended in disaster. Haunted by her failure, she lives in quiet anonymity, convinced her days in space are over. She's wrong. A large alien object has entered the solar system on a straight course toward Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate and is ignoring all incoming transmissions. Out of time and out of options, NASA turns to Jansen. For all the dangers of the mission, it's the shot at redemption she always longed for.

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.

After more than 20 years in special operations, USMC Gunnery Sergeant Wolf Mathison wasn’t looking forward to retirement when—implanted with an experimental artificial intelligence—he deployed on his last mission with a platoon of Marine Raiders being sent to the Jovian moon Europa. The USS Jefferson was destroyed en route, though, and only Mathison and three other marines survived. Trapped in stasis, they were hurled into the outer reaches of the solar system, where they wouldn’t be found for hundreds of years.

I’ve broken free and I’ve also freed the human who was held captive with me. But I don’t know where we are, and I don’t know where my home is. The local wildlife may be smaller than I am, and maybe they don't have fangs near as large as mine, but I’m still terrified. My issues with germs—and my uncompromising avoidance of all the things that I’m afraid of coming into contact with—is going to get me killed in this wilderness. Thankfully, Aurora lets me follow her. Thankfully, she seems to know the way out of this endless and inhospitable woodland and desert biome.

The lines. The soul of every ship. It was once thought there were only 10, but that was before an alien vessel appeared at the edge of space - before Ean Lambert heard more lines singing. Ean's ways of communicating with lines is strange. But his abilities make him a valuable tool - or weapon - to command. Captain Selma Kari Wang has lost everything - her ship, her crew, her legs. But the New Alliance of Worlds is not done with her yet.

Hygeia, an outer rim colony, is doomed as the moon on which it was built hurtles toward an inevitable collision with the dead planet Hephaestus. When a distress signal arrives from a Weyland-Yutani biowarfare outpost near the colony, a desperate plan is launched to evacuate the trapped scientists and colonists. Their destination: LV-846, a key United Americas colony where high-level talks are scheduled to address the galaxy-wide hostilities between the colonies.

Assigned to a new warship with cutting-edge technology, Jack Samson returns to the Frontier, determined to cast off the question marks over his previous conduct. The Navy ventures ever farther beyond the Frontier, with fantastic new discoveries becoming a daily occurrence. As humanity reaches for these technological riches, it enters a deadly contest with a lethal adversary, the very survival of the human race being at stake.

He'd had so many names over the centuries, so many new identities that he could scarcely remember who he had originally been. Now his name was Daetrin, a name given by the alien conquerors of humankind, the Tyr. Three hundred years had passed since the Tyr conquered the people of Earth as they had previously overcome numerous races throughout the galaxy.

During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first she’s delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move. As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation. First contact isn’t at all what she imagined, and events push her to the very limits of what it means to be human. While Kira faces her own horrors, Earth and its colonies stand upon the brink of annihilation. Now, Kira might be humanity’s greatest and final hope....

In a far corner of space, on the very borders between humanity’s Polity worlds and the kingdom of the vicious crab-like prador, is an immediate threat to all sentient life: an accretion disc, a solar system designed by the long-dead Jain race and swarming with living technology powerful enough to destroy entire civilizations. Neither the Polity or the prador want the other in full control of the disc, so they’ve placed an impartial third party in charge of the weapons platform guarding the technology from escaping into the galaxy: Orlandine, a part-human, part-AI haiman.

CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson has one simple task: Watch an ambassador’s dog while the diplomat is conducting sensitive negotiations with an alien race. But you know dogs - always getting into something. And when this dog gets into something that could launch an alien civil war, Wilson has to find a way to solve the conflict, fast, or be the one in the Colonial Union’s doghouse. "The Dog King" is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories set in the Old Man's War universe.

Combat is literally her middle name. Chimeric Adaptive Enhanced Combat Operator - but now Caeco Jensen - works for the FBI, building a new life and trying to learn from a painful past. It’s hard to fit in when you are one of a kind, but maybe, just maybe, there’s a place for her in this world. That is, if threats from off planet don’t ruin it first. Forging and protecting a new future with a her unique skillset won’t be easy, maybe almost as hard as making new friends.

Gun Meister Online is a recently released virtual-reality combat simulator. Players assume the role of a Meister; fighting in matches and ranking up into higher divisions. Within the game, weapons take on human shape. These NPC's use a new Dynamic Distributed Personality System recently implemented, and many are excited by how life-like the AI characters are becoming. Charlie has only just begun to play, and he struggles to grow as a Meister. At the same time, he starts to take charge of his real-life outside.

After crashing onto a desert planet filled with alien savages, I find myself struggling to survive. My sister relies on me for her medicine, so I must get back to her. Problem is, a lone alien with an intense stare and brands on his chest has been stalking me from afar. When he finally approaches me, I’m surprised to learn he wants to help. But just as I’m given this lifeline, we're both captured by a savage tribe. They want him to take me by force, to prove to everyone that he’s the vicious beast they say he is. Either he claims me, or all the warriors of the tribe will.

Año 2130. Después del impacto de un enorme asteroide que destruye Padua y Verona, se crea en un sofisticado sistema de detectar la trayectoria de cualquier objeto que se detecte desde la Tierra De esta forma los astrónomos detectan un misterioso asteroide, al que bautizan como «Rama», que está a punto de cruzar el sistema solar. Se trata de un cilindro perfecto de unos cincuenta kilómetros de largo, que gira a una velocidad fuera de lo normal y viaja por el espacio en línea recta.