(Warning: Do not read Betrayal before Resurrection as the story might spoil the end of Resurrection.) Betrayal is a short story told from the viewpoint of Scarlett. It details the events leading up to the third Demon Squad book, At the Gates, out December 1st from Damnation Books.A bonus story, Prohibition Black and Blues is included, featuring Frank "Triggaltheron" Trigg in the Roaring Twenties.

    Original.

    Obsidian Worlds brings together his 11 best-selling sci-fi shorts into a mind-bending philosophical anthology.In Your Averaged Joe, a man’s headache is large enough to hold the multiverse. Q46F is an obsessive-compulsive android who finds love in a zombie-embroiled apocalypse. The end of the world isn’t all that bad – The Experience Machine will fulfil your every desire (and some you hadn’t considered). A sex bot dares to dream of freedom in Dinner with Flexi. But mind what you eat, because The Photons in the Cheese Are Lost. Don’t fret though: The Cryo Killer guarantees that your death will be painless, or your money back when you’re thawed. Unless, that is, you’re The Man with Two Legs.Plug into Obsidian Worlds for these and other immersive stories, including the hilarious Time-Traveling Chicken Sexer. Your brain will never be the same again.

    Still in mourning following the death of his beloved grandfather, isolated from many of his friends and bored out of his mind at school, Theo has sunk to a new low that neither his interfering auntie Annie nor his best friend and neighbour Jules can shake him out of.Then one morning, Theo unexpectedly receives a mysterious parcel containing a newspaper and a cryptic letter and sets out with Jules to unravel its mystery. Following a trail of clues, Theo is led on a startling voyage of discovery into deep space where he discovers that the Universe is stranger, more exciting and more dangerous than he can possibly imagine. Will he have the courage to leave behind everything he has ever known in pursuit of an exciting new life or will his darkest fears triumph, forever putting his dreams out of reach?Meanwhile, the mysterious Star Agency watches patiently from the shadows, preparing to make its move...The Star Agency is book 1 of The Star Agency Chronicles, an interstellar secret agent adventure aimed at readers aged 9 and above.

    The stars brought aliens to Earth. Claiming both cost us everything. A hungry alien empire known as The Collective has betrayed humanity. Earth is taken. Day-by-day, the ruthless Over-Seer harvests the planet we worked so hard to save, and only a mysterious group of individuals have found any success against him. The Elementals. Damien Vilan is one of these human enigmas. Able to spawn black holes and even smother light, he is the first man to ever command tangible darkness. While Damien stands lonely in the crumbling Seattle Islets alongside his adopted alien brother and an eccentric AI, the occupying aliens are hunting him. When a botched ambush on an enemy patrol wounds Damien’s brother, the trio is forced to test the weapon they’ve been building. If it works, it could change the downward spiral of the war, but if it fails and Damien’s dangerous powers are exposed? It could bring the Over-Seer himself crashing down on them. The tyrant would love to get his hands on such a powerful man, and he'd surely use Damien to find the elusive island sanctuary where other Elementals are gathering... When every chance of success has faded with the light, who better to turn to than the man who wields darkness? HOPE IS BORN IN DARKNESS

    For a Caesar is indeed dead, neither the first, nor the last, but it is one who has been slain well ahead his time. Pick up a history book, and it will tell you that the crazed Gaius Julius Caesar, better known as Caligula to the world, was assassinated in January of 41 A.D. But displaced time traveler Jacob Hunter would disagree with this historical fact, because he has witnessed this death years earlier and stands accused of murdering the Caesar himself. With the threat of crucifixion looming, Hunter and his friends, who had just recently sacrificed so much to defend Rome, chose exile over death, and fled the Eternal City.Four years later, Hunter remains on the run in the hinterlands of Rome’s numerous provinces, wanted as an outlaw by the Empress Agrippina – Caligula’s sister. Throughout these long years, he and his two closest companions have been hunted by many, but remain undeterred by their challenges. Because what those who pursue them do not know is that Jacob Hunter is from the future, where his chosen calling was that of a simple, yet deadly, Navy SEAL. Equipped with advanced weaponry and the most cutting edge Special Forces training, he and his friends are not afraid of the primitive denizens of the past and will stop at nothing to return home.But what aids them most in their quest is the gift of foresight.Knowledge is power, as some would say, and it is with that power that Hunter devises a plan to fix all that has been broken due to their presence in the past. Caligula, as flawed an emperor as he was, should have ruled as such for years, followed by Claudius, a far more competent emperor. But now both are dead and Agrippina, the mother of Nero and a far more ruthless leader, rules in their stead. In Hunter’s mind, this breach of historical events could prove catastrophic to the timeline’s development, perhaps changing the future completely, and with it, his home.Unable to act, years have passed waiting for the best moment to strike, but the time has finally arrived. To restore the timeline, Hunter must remove Agrippina and keep her aggressive and murderous policies from continuing. But three people, no matter how skilled and powerful they are, cannot possibly match the overwhelming might of the powerful Roman war machine. To be successful, they’ll need to be unscrupulous, and do something many may consider vile and irredeemable, because while the Empress Agrippina is certainly shrewd and ruthless, she is still a mother, and like any mother, would be devastated should anything happen to her infant son Nero…

     Martin L. Shoemaker, author of “Today I Am Paul”, presents stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary work. Planning, exploring, constructing… living and growing and dying… across the Solar System. Includes these award-winning stories: Scramble (second place, Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, 2012) Unrefined (third place, Writers of the Future, 2014) Racing to Mars (first place, Analog Analytical Laboratory award, 2016) Plus seven more stories!

    The only thing left in his hollowed out world is retribution.Havoc is drawn into a top secret Contact mission – humanity's first – after an extraordinary energy source is detected at the limit of reachable space. While the crew of the AV Intrepid struggle with saboteurs and hostile ships, they fail to realize that the alien world holds dangers that threaten far more than their ship. Imprisoned on Plash is a weapon of unimaginable horror – a species eliminator.REDEMPTION PROTOCOL is a hard hitting space opera/ scifi adventure. It is the FIRST book in the Contact series. Rated [R]. Violence, sex, profanity.US English. 166,500 words.

    Troy Denning

    it's all in a day's work for Jim Meade: Martian P.I.In a slow orbit around the sun, just beyond Mars, a mining colony known as Rosetta houses thousands of Consortium citizens who mine the valuable ore Humanity uses for space travel. Over the last three years, Rosetta has grown exponentially, from a tiny mining colony, into an economic behemoth that threatens the delicate balance of power between The Consortium and Coalition - two nations who are still healing from a devastating nuclear war that turned Earth into a hellscape of hopelessness and despair.After a prominent scientist for The Consortium dies in an apparent accident, Jim Meade is hired by the victim's family to find out what really happened to their father Dr. Sanjay Sinjakama. There, Meade finds himself caught up in a power struggle between the diabolical CEO of Nebula Mining Dimitri Koschei, and Lazarus Rincon, the charismatic leader of a vicious cult.With the assistance of his friend and confidant (the beautiful Emeline Hunan), Meade races against the clock to find Sinjakama's murderer and prevent a catastrophic disaster that might mean the end of all life on Earth.

    Their sacred duty: to protect humanity from itself… and from everything else. Lord Anakreon, Warden of the First Circle, has a problem. He’s been forced to kill another apprentice, and he’s rapidly running out of candidates. In fact, there is precisely one left… On Earth, Tristan Andrews is in trouble. He has been ever since the day his dad left for work – and never came home. Seven years later, living with one foot on the street, Tristan is struggling to survive. Until a tough old man with a scarred face breaks into his house. He claims to have the answers Tristan seeks… But there’s a price.

    She's sliding void in an ageing seven-hundred-year-old space ship, scrabbling around the edges of civilised space trying to find a cargo lucrative enough to pay her bills without proving so risky that it'll kill her. She's got an alien religious freak for a navigator, an untrustworthy android for a first mate, a disgraced lizard for a trade negotiator and a deserter from the fleet acting as her chief engineer. And that was well before an ex-crewman turns up wanting Lana to rescue a barbarian prince from a long-failed colony world. An alien romance? Well, they never work out.Unfortunately, for Lana, the problems she doesn't know about are even more dangerous. In fact, they just might be enough to destroy Lana's rickety but much-loved vessel, the Gravity Rose, and jettison her and her crew into the void without a spacesuit.But there's one thing you can never tell an independent space trader. That's the odds...

    The station is in a security lockdown and the sole apparent occupant, a Union captain, offers Kieran an entire ship if he can disable the lockdown. Kieran realizes that he’s probably dealing with a criminal, rather than an actual captain, but he’s just desperate enough to accept. He flies out to the nearest station and returns with a slicer and some dangerous-looking backup. As he’s making his approach to the station, Kieran hears a garbled cry for help over the comm. He hopes it’s just his imagination.But it’s not. Half the station’s crew is being held hostage, while the other half appear to be masquerading as Union officers. Kieran and his team disable the lockdown, and to Kieran’s amazement, they are given a ship as promised. As they are leaving the station, they see an entire fleet of Union cruisers pouring out of the newly-reactivated space gate. Kieran is confused. What are so many warships doing on the frontier? The Union isn’t at war.Kieran sets out to investigate, but along the way strange things start happening to him and his crew. At first there seem to be logical explanations, but before long the answers are not so clear. As time goes by, Kieran realizes the horrible truth:He wasn’t the only one trying to escape. . . .

    The first few chapters are available as 'The Chronicles of Engella Rhys (Preview).' Would you sacrifice your future to save your past? Engella Rhys is alone, adrift and on the run. Pursued by a secret agency, known only as the Hunters, she must stay ahead to stay alive. As she travels through space-time using dangerously experimental technology, she only has one wish: to be reunited with her lost parents. After a close shave with a Hunter on the streets of New Shanghai, Engella escapes to find herself on a deserted beach. When she meets a kind stranger, who offers her food and shelter, Engella feels safe and protected for the first time in years. But who is this woman? And why did their paths cross at the most convenient of times? Engella soon discovers their lives are intertwined in more ways than she could ever imagine.

    In this age of dramatic technological advancement, Vandercroft was fascinated by how the rise of steam technology at the start of the American Civil War had transformed warfare and the role of the fighting man. This volume collects all of Vandercroft's surviving paintings, along with his associated commentary on the specific military units he encountered.