Hard Contact

Rick and his crew live on the edge of Earth Corps space, where the law is what you make it and the taxman doth fear to tread. While a war rages, he salvages its wreckage, profiteering from the misery of others. Despite his plan to sit it out from the sidelines and fill his pockets, Rick is drawn into a galactic conflict. When an alien armada is set to crash down upon Sol, he has to choose between cold hard cash or his conscience.

A masculine hardboiled detective who is cynical and jaded about Los Angeles crime meets his match in an uppity young hacker who knows her erotic sexual value. This is a story about our present future. About how a man and a woman meet and fall in love under extenuating circumstances. The heavy steam layers onto the narrative in this HOT story from the tantalizingly morbid mind of Alice Crowley!

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.

Jo has no idea what she's getting into as she picks up a hitchhiker on a dark country road. Turns out he's an alien, and he and his friend need help to find a crashed spaceship to escape this planet before a terrible fate catches up with them. When one of the aliens goes into a breeding rut, Jo must decide how far she's willing to go to help her new friends.

It is 2076: Lancer, Earth’s first starship, is on a mission to find interstellar civilizations. Although astronaut Nigel Walmsley’s experiences with alien encounters make him the expert, no one believes Nigel’s theory that machines are the dominant intelligent beings left in the galaxy and that their purpose is to annihilate all organic life. Then the explorers discover once-living planets where only machines remain – and ruined worlds where fugitive survivors must evade omnipresent and lethally advanced A.I. warships.

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.

Robert Baxter once reveled in the intoxicating delights of Atopia - the man-made island where humans lose themselves in a world of boundless virtual realities. Now, Bob has returned to immerse himself in this mind-altering, consciousness-sharing refuge from the eroding Earth. But something is very wrong. Bob feels a tidal wave of doom cresting above the pleasure dome that is Atopia. As alternate universes perish, the salvation of all he loves - and all that exists - rests with Bob alone.

It's coming up on Cajeiri's birthday. The boy has been promised he can have the young human children he knew from his voyage sent down from the space station for a two week stay. But there's a far darker business going on in the background - a major split compromising the Assassins' Guild, which furnishes security and law enforcement to the whole continent. Tabini's consort's own father has been barred from court, and may be involved in a new conspiracy against him.

Avalon was thriving. The cold sleep colonists from Earth had settled on a verdant, livable world. The fast and cunning predators humans named “grendels” were under control, and the mainland outposts well established. Avalon’s new mainland hydroelectric power station was nearly complete, and when on-line would compensate for the nuclear power systems lost in the Grendel Wars. Humans would have power, and with power came the ability to make all the necessities for life. They would survive. They would not survive as a spacefaring people.

Now the planet faces a brutal alien conquest. The Spirit of Destiny lies wrecked on the moon On Earth, the crew of the alien behemoth Lightbringer spread destruction across a planet racked by conflict. But Jack and his fellow survivors of the Europa mission, trapped in Earth's ramshackle little moon colony, haven't given up. Exposed to the constant threat of attack, they come up with a perilous plan to return to Earth and fight the aliens.

Abyss Deep is a foreboding ocean planet torn by extremes: boiling storm world on one side, unbroken glacier on the other. Humans established a research colony there to study the planet's giant sea serpents - but the colony has gone ominously silent. When Carlyle's team arrives, they discover a vessel belonging to a warlike alien species hovering above the atmosphere. But below the ice lurks a mystery so chilling it will make even Elliot Carlyle's blood run cold.

In Conquest of the New World, the inevitable moment arrives—humanity’s century-long broadcasts into the cosmos are finally answered. But as an alien ship enters Earth’s orbit, claiming peaceful intent, the world is on the brink of unprecedented transformation—or catastrophe. This brilliantly crafted thriller blends the geopolitical depth of Tom Clancy with the scientific precision of Arthur C. Clarke, creating a narrative that is as much about international power struggles and crisis management as it is about the philosophical and existential dilemmas of First Contact.

A civilization-destroying omega cloud has switched direction, heading straight for a previously unexplored planetary system--and its alien society. And suddenly, a handful of brave humans must try to save an entire world--without revealing their existence.

Julie E. Czerneda's acclaimed Web Shifters series continues with the story of Esen - the last survivor of a unique alien race. Able to take on the form of any creature she observes, Esen has long since broken the cardinal rule of her species: noninterference.

New York Times best-selling author Ian Douglas delivers the action-packed second military sci-fi adventure in his Solar Warden series set in a wildly imaginative alternate present where conspiracy theories are terrifying realities and reptilian aliens team up with Nazis in space.

Thomas Jerome Newton is an extraterrestrial from the planet Anthea, which has been devastated by a series of nuclear wars and whose inhabitants are twice as intelligent as human beings. When he lands on Earth—in Kentucky, disguised as a human—it's with the intention of saving his own people from extinction. Newton patents some very advanced Anthean technology, which he uses to amass a fortune. He begins to build a spaceship to help the last 300 Antheans migrate to Earth.

When the first astronauts of the Mars Colony returned to Earth, they brought a mysterious, metal box they had found half-buried in the red dirt, called the Mars Cube. The scientists assigned to uncover its secrets tested it, scanned it, tried to blow it up, and everything in between. Then they accidentally opened it. Biosafety level-4 laboratories, BSL4, hold the most deadly viruses on the Earth, and Juliet handled them daily. Her research at the CDC landed her a position on the Mars Cube Investigative Team in the world’s only BSL-5 lab.

Books By This Author SHIFTER BEAST BUNDLE Praise for Alice Crowley's writing: "I LOVED THE IMAGINATION OF THIS AUTHOR!" ~Satisfied Kindle Reader "FIVE STARS!" ~ Multiple Fans "Alice Crowley is one of our best living authors!" ~ G. Taylor In this 6,000-Word short story, a frumpy female professor of anthropology named Lorine meets a gang of half-men, half-beast alpha males with the drive to dive deep into her flesh! Now Lorine is the only way to get a specimen back to Earth from Mars, and she has to agree to be used as bait to lure these hunky masculine mutants into captivity with her sexy ...

Millennia of conflict between humans and mechs have driven the human race to near-extinction. Now, as the fierce AI mechs begin their final assault on mankind, it soon becomes apparent that three men – three generations in a family of voyagers – are their targets. Toby Bishop, his father, Killeen Bishop, and his grandfather, Nigel Walmsley, each carry a piece of the lethal secret that can destroy their enemies. But hunted through space and time by relentless assassins, they have no idea that they possess the only weapon that can save humanity.

Jamie Hawkins became a swashbuckling space pirate to fight tyranny. When Jamie Hawkins saved the lives of women and children who were caught in the crossfire of war, he fell squarely in the crosshairs of avenging soldiers and was unfairly convicted of treason. Sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor in an infamous penal colony on a faraway planet, his courage won him the admiration of his fellow convicts. While plotting his escape, an enemy attacked the planet, giving this daring warrior his chance. Together with his fellow prisoners, he launched a bold assault and hijacked the enemy ...