Space Military Fiction

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.

Keeping up-to-date with the most buzzworthy and cutting-edge science fiction requires sifting through countless magazines, e-zines, websites, blogs, original anthologies, single-author collections, and more - a task accomplishable by only the most determined and voracious readers. For everyone else, Night Shade Books is proud to introduce the latest volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, collecting the finest that the genre has to offer, from the biggest names in the field to the most exciting new writers.

The Cygnus-Orion Galactic Arm Spur is being devoured by warfare. The vile Atrekna have launched a second spoked offensive despite the fact the first one was blunted. However, this time the Confederacy is ready to defend the tens of thousands of stellar systems threatened. Operation Iron Piglet and Atomite Djinn pit the Confederacy against the Atrekna in a no holds barred slug-fest. The Confederacy knows that the Atrekna have to be stopped completely and then rooted out. There is no choice but to throw everything at defending the worlds the Atrekna attack. And even liberate the ones that ...

Five men and women venture to another universe to find beings whose power gives them abilities they can’t imagine. Their leader? The greatest warrior produced since Prometheus: Achilles. Young, untested, but with unbridled potential, will his raw talent be enough? Can Achilles fight gods and turn back the tide of fate for the entire universe? Or will he be crushed like an ant beneath the feet of beings who can walk the stars?

Following events at the Helius Blackstar, Duggan is given the Space Corps' newest warship - a heavy cruiser armed to the teeth with the latest weapons and technology. A prospector craft, the SC Lupus, has gone missing and his superiors want to find out what happened and the aggressors dealt with accordingly. The wrecked spaceship is soon found. However, nothing is as it seems. What Duggan finds on a distant planet turns everything on its head.

The first of the acclaimed Vatta's War books, the exciting military science fiction series that features a swashbuckling spaceship-captain heroine who mixes commerce with combat.

The Unified Civilized Council, which has ruled for over a hundred million years has discovered new species in the Long Dark. A strange and unknown species that seem to have no rhyme or reason about them with strange technology and hints of even more in the shadows. Compounding the problem is the reappearance of the ancient Precursor Autonomous War Machines, woken up from tens of thousands of years of offline status due to incursions into their territory. Even worse is the fact that the newly discovered Terran Confederacy of Aligned Systems appear to be the only force capable of stopping the...

All Thorn wanted was to be a Battle Mage. He had the talent, and his whole future was before him. On the day of Choosing, he finds things don't always go as planned. Suddenly Thorn's life is thrown into fast forward, and he finds himself in a world not of his own choosing. In a world of spaceships and blasters, instead of horses and swords, Thorn needs to adapt and survive, make new allies, and rediscover that although nothing is familiar, he's still a Mage, and pirates and slavers beware.

GSW - a.k.a. a gunshot wound - back to front. That’s what landed me in Sophie’s operating room after a black op went to hell. After I bled out, she “volunteered” me for Project Angel, a top-secret program determined to revive KIAs with alien tech. I became their first success. Fast-forward to Armageddon: Demons are everywhere. Bodies even more so. After some intense fighting, we’ve reached the hospital where she worked. The place looks grim, but I’m not about to stop searching for the angel who saved my life.

Caleb Mitchell gave up everything to protect his home. Shunned by friends and family for abandoning the pacifist beliefs of their religion, abandoned by the love of his life, he left his home world of Canaan to go to the Commonwealth Military Academy on Earth and train to fight in the looming war against the implacable alien threat of the Tahni Imperium. When a training mission with a crew of cadets winds up caught in the middle of one of the worst battles of the war, Cal and his fellow students are officially declared dead.

Although the exciting military career she hoped for never got off the ground, Ky Vatta ended up seeing plenty of combat when she took the helm of one of the commercial transport vessels in her family's fleet...and steered it into a full-blown war. Now the lessons she learned in that trial by fire are about to pay off---because this time, the war has come to her. Someone has launched a full-throttle offensive against Vatta Transport Ltd., Ky's father's interstellar shipping empire.

Devi Morris has a lot of problems, and not the fun, easy-to-shoot kind either. After a mysterious attack left her short several memories and one partner, she'd determined to keep her head down, do her job, and get on with her life. But even though Devi's not actually looking for it this time, trouble keeps finding her. She sees ghostly creatures no one else can, the inexplicable black stain on her hands keeps getting bigger, and she can't seem to stop getting into compromising situations with a man she's supposed to hate.

Glory barely survived its last battle twenty years ago. Captain Drake resigned rather than face court martial. But the enemy is back, and humanity needs everything that can fly. Maybe it’s not the ship at all but the crew. They hold the key. Drake rallies old and young alike to comply with orders so secret even he wasn’t allowed to see them until after the ship left the junkyard. Would it leave? That was another question. The core hadn’t been fired in twenty years.

From bestselling author Saxon Andrew comes a story about all the things that make us human. Angle Barrett decides to buy a broken spaceship as a monument to his deceased wife. He had no idea that purchase would lead to repercussions that would shake the foundations of all the civilizations in the galaxy. All he wanted was to live in peace until he joined his wife. Instead, he is targeted by the most powerful civilization in the galaxy, and they will do anything to prevent a secret from coming out, even if it means destroying Earth in the process. A Warship Named Sky-A Hero's Story is a ...

Major Jake Thomas is on a roll. With the help of the Artificial Life: Intelligent Computing Environments, or ALICE, systems, he has successfully faced off with the hostile NeHaw three times. With continued support from his inner circle of female recruits, all handpicked by the ALICEs to further their own agenda, he continues to try to help Earth return to glory.

Almost 400 years the Terran Imperium has languished, an Empire in name only. The young colonies exploded out of the Diaspora Era, supplanting the homeworld in importance as they left a broken world in their wake. Earth's people, guided by the Conwin line, have clawed and climbed from the darkness left the night the lights went out. They built and rebuilt the weary and weakened world they inherited, even when it seemed bent on killing them from sheer spite.

After being court-martialed by the Space Legion for ordering the strafing of a treaty-signing ceremony, multimillionaire Willard Phule receives his punishment: He must command the misfit Omega Company on Haskin's Planet, a mining settlement on the edge of settled space. At his duty station, he leverages his personal money and a knack for managing people to get the company to come together as a unit.

The galaxy burns. The enemy, a race of alien scorpions, storms from star to star. Planets smolder in their wake. Across the galaxy, they hunt humans. Long ago, we humans had a planet of our own. Long ago, we could have resisted the scorpions. But today we are refugees. We are lost in darkness. We haven't seen Earth in 2,000 years. We, the last humans, must band together. We must resist. We must fight the scorpions. And we must find Earth! Only Earth can unite us. Only Earth can kindle our hope. Only on Earth can we defend our species.

Humanity's thousand-year-old interstellar empire has been rotting from the inside for over a century, thanks to venal, corrupt, and power-hungry sovereigns from a dynasty many consider illegitimate. The latest in that lineage, an increasingly psychotic empress, is pushing her realm toward collapse as admirals and generals rebel against her rule. That rebellion quickly drags the once mighty Imperial Fleet into a devastating fratricidal conflict between factions.

Sera leads a simple life. A little smuggling, some drinking contests, and captaining her star freighter, Sabrina. But when she picks up a mysterious shipping container on Coburn Station, things begin to go wrong. She finds herself at odds with The Mark, a dangerous pirate organization that wants the cargo on her ship. Inside the container she not only finds a woman, but a secret thought lost millennia ago.