First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-- and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. To defend Earth, and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force. Everybody knows that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve two years at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets.John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine--and what he will become is far stranger.

    The alien Arachnids were an enemy whose like no civilized race had ever confronted. Like some carnivorous cancer, the "Bugs" had overrun planet after planet . . . and they regarded any competing sentient species as only one more protein source. Defeat was not an option. . . . The Grand Alliance of Humans, Orions, Ophiuchi, and Gorm, united in desperate self-defense, have been driven to the wall. Billions of their civilians have been slaughtered. Their most powerful offensive operation has ended in shattering defeat and the deaths of their most experienced military commanders. Whatever they do, the Bugs just keep coming. But the warriors of the Grand Alliance know what stands behind them and they will surrender no more civilians to the oncoming juggernaut. They will die first-and they will also reactivate General Directive 18, however horrible it may be. Because when the only possible outcomes are victory or racial extermination, only one option is acceptable. The Shiva Option.And peace isn't always wonderful Once the enemy is defeated, the central governments of the Inner Worlds were anything but willing to relinguish their wartime powers. To insure that their grip on the reins of power remained firm, the bureaucrats are allowing the non-human beings of the Khanate in, while keeping the Fringe Worlds out, smugly confident that this will keep the colonial upstarts in their place. The Fringers have only one answer to that: Insurrection.

    Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclearpowered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. But when Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, inexplicably leaves its natural orbit and heads out of the solar system at high speed, Bella is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever out of reach. In accepting this mission she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny-for Janus has many surprises in store, and not all of them are welcome...

    Original.Cuckoo's EggThey named him Thorn. They told him he was of their people, although he was so different. He was ugly in their eyes, strange, sleek-skinned instead of furred, clawless, different. Yet he was of their power class: judge-warriors, the elite, the fighters, the defenders.Thorn knew that his difference was somehow very important -- but not important enough to prevent murderous conspiracies against him, against his protector, against his caste, and perhaps against the peace of the world. But when the crunch came, when Thorn finally learned what his true role in life was to be, that on him might hang the future of two worlds, then he had to stand alone to justify his very existence.Serpent's ReachWithin the Constellation of the Serpent, out of bounds to all spacefarers, humans live among the insect-like aliens--and one of them, a woman named Raen, is bent on a revenge that will tear apart the truce between human and alien. "Brisk pacing . . . and genuinely brilliant world-building."--ALA Booklist. Reissue.

    Hell is forever: Two centuries earlier its ecosphere had been infected with microscopic nanomachines that destroy electrical conductors, condemning its inmates to a neo-Victorian steam-and-gaslight society without computers, spaceflight, or any hope of escape.Peter soon learns that he has been framed by Earth's paranoid world government, and is offered a pardon in return for conducting a reconnaissance mission to Hell and back. There are hints that Hell is developing impossible technologies or has even neutralized the wire-eating nanobugs entirely. How he will return from Hell is a secret known only to his grim mission partner, agent Geyl Shreve of Earth’s shadowy Special Implementer Service.But Peter has a secret as well: He is a member of the outlawed Sangruse Society, and in his blood flows the Sangruse Device, Version 9, the most powerful nanocomputer AI ever created. Although supposedly Peter's protector and advisor, the Device answers to no one but the Society's mysterious leader, and has reasons of its own for visiting Hell. Peter soon discovers that he is little more than a disguise, caught in a covert war among Earth, a revolutionary group bent on overthrowing Earth's government, Hell's ingenious inmates, and the deadly mechanism in his veins. For as fearsome as it is, the Sangruse Device itself is afraid—and the fates of whole worlds would be decided by the threat that the Cunning Blood has discovered outside of space and time.