Hard Space Opera

Gita Chithra, the captain of the intergalactic ship The Tempest, is used to leading her crew on simple retrieval and assistance missions. But when she receives a frantic distress call from Ri, the AI she trained from inception—making her like a daughter to Gita—she knows she’s in for something much more dangerous. Ri is trapped in the depths of Loki’s Ring, an artificial alien-made solar system, and says everyone in the vicinity has been infected and killed by a mysterious contagion. Gita and her team investigate, only to discover horrors at every turn.

Thorvald Spear wakes in hospital, where he finds he's been brought back from the dead. What's more, he died in a human vs. alien war which ended a whole century ago. But when he relives his traumatic final moments, he finds the spark to keep on living. That spark is vengeance. Trapped and desperate on a world surrounded by alien Prador forces, Spear had seen a rescue ship arriving. But instead of providing backup, Penny Royal, the AI within the destroyer, turned rogue. It annihilated friendly forces in a frenzy of destruction, and years later it's still free.

In a future where humanity has scattered itself across the stars and Earth itself is now a dimly remembered place of legend, two worlds of near-supernatural strangeness challenge two naive but courageous heroes.

"Pellucidar" is a fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, part of his series about the fictional "hollow earth" land of Pellucidar. David Innes and his captive, a member of the reptilian Mahar master race of the interior world of Pellucidar, return from the surface world in the Iron Mole invented by his friend and companion in adventure Abner Perry. Emerging in Pellucidar at an unknown location, David frees his captive.

Konran Andacellos has all but given up on his dream to be a starfighter. After botching an airshow maneuver and being reduced to a captaincy on a rock hauler, the ambitious 22-year-old never expected an ambush to sweep in and blow his convoy to dust. With the lives of his crew on the line, Konran leaps into a pitiful one-man defense craft and obliterates the enemy against impossible odds.

The generation ship Peerless is in search of advanced technology capable of sparing their home planet from imminent destruction. In theory, the ship is traveling fast enough that it can traverse the cosmos for generations and still return home only a few years after they departed. But a critical fuel shortage threatens to cut their urgent voyage short, even as a population explosion stretches the ship’s life-support capacity to its limits.

Sometimes the few must stand against the many. From the dark, cold void came an unknown force. Their target: a remote planet, the home of a group of people distancing themselves from mankind and pursuing a path of piety and peace. If they have any chance at survival, a disparate group of pilots must come together to fight back any way they can. But the best these aces can do might not be good enough.

Geoff and his friends live in Phocaea, a distant asteroid colony on the Solar System's frontier. They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes.

The lost battle of Terra Nova has shown even the biggest skeptics how serious the alien threat really is. The power blocs of the solar system unite for one last cataclysmic showdown. Meanwhile, an unlikely trio races against time to prevent the conflict from reaching Earth. Tsai Yini, the tachyon chronicler, is hoping for help from her father, who has survived a hundred-year journey and seems to have a special relationship with the attackers.

Provenance: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned. Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future, her family, and her world.

The mysterious species called Flickers are thought to have a base in the outer solar system. A task force is sent to find out. Living in the Kuiper Zone, the Flicker want nothing more than to be left alone. But the solar system belongs to humans. Can the two coexist? Or will history repeat and contact lead to war, as has so often happened in humanity's past?

The game never changes, only the players do. Others might call it rebellion, call it cowardice. The vanguard will not forgive, nor will they forget. Their trust lays with one another, in those that have shed blood with them and joined the net. Empires, government, leaders, alliances, planets, corporations - many have fallen in humanities past. Now a new Empire will stand on the shoulders of the vanguard, the troopers, the people of Tricticus, and the Victor Corporation. Their goal: survive, and defend those they care for by any means necessary.

Commander Joe Pikeman is on a mission he didn’t ask for…and wasn’t ordered on. Then again, he isn’t in the mood to sit back while Fairfax takes over the galaxy, either. Fairfax’s power stretches across the stars, and he’s calling in all his favors. From sparking a bot rebellion to engineering godlike monsters to crush his enemies, he seems determined to ruin Joe’s day. But he made one mistake: he screwed with Joe’s family. And as messed up as they are, that simply isn’t something Joe can allow.

Devastated early in the war, the United Systems Alliance has retaken several key systems lost to the Galactic Union. But getting even isn’t good enough for General Hella. Determined to end the costly war and destroy the Union, Hella launches a daring offensive against the planet Kuut, a key military base deep in Union space. At the tip of the spear, Lieutenant Mark Rizer and the Marines of Orcus Company find themselves in the mud and blood of a planetary ground invasion.

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.

Kylara had to leave a bright future as a military cadet and was thrown into the brutal world of off-world trading. This subsequent career in the family business was tough: marked by war, mutiny, and attempted assassination. But then her home was attacked and her parents killed - their trading empire left in ruins. Now she must save what is left of the family and the business, with few friends and too few assets.

As the conflict in the asteroid belt escalates, Luca finds herself seeking out the help of Athena, the QI on Earth. Together they hatch a complex plan to end the power of the Van Heilding family. Meanwhile, resistance to the ongoing power grab by the Xiang Zu Corporation is gaining traction in Elektra, a quadruple asteroid system and the second most populous sector of the Belt. Miranda, Scott, and Cyrus find themselves being dragged into this fight following rumors that the QI, stolen en route to New World One, has resurfaced in the hands of the rebels.

The operation aboard the Daedalus was a success, but the aftermath threatens to undo everything the Jax and his team have achieved. Separated from his ship, he is forced to work with Penny, the agent of a notorious black-market arms dealer. Their lifeboat has taken serious damage, and the only way they can survive the maelstrom is to journey to its center. Safety lies aboard an ancient ship. However, Jax immediately finds himself facing a new challenge at the behest of a new master - all the while avoiding the prior ones who want their pound flesh...and credit.

A quarter of a millennium ago, before the nuclear apocalypse forced the inhabitants of earth to flee their home planet, few humans could have imagined the course their path would take. Now, the orbital colonies are the final sanctuary of humanity and life is more dangerous than ever before. The colonists fear the return of their dreaded enemies, the Paratwa – ferocious warriors who are genetically engineered to exist in two bodies which remain telepathically connected.

Within the L, a tri-star system located inside the Aquilian Nebula, Jax makes a living trading and smuggling whatever goods pay the best. So far, he’s avoided being caught with anything too damning in his ship’s holds, but when he takes a job for Korinth, an infamous arms dealer, all that changes. The haul is worth 10 times his ship, and when the contents gets him embroiled in a tug of war between the major political factions of the L, Jax has to keep the criminals he works for from discovering that he’s playing both sides.