Space Science Exploration

For Lovers of Speculative Fiction Paranoid Droid by Kayelle Allen Dragon Hunt by Claudia Blood Vinyl by Claudia Blood Searchers by Marc Neuffer Trespass by Marc Neuffer Last Mission by SA Gibson & JI Rogers Punching the Clock by Howard Loring Clash of the Red Heads by Howard Loring Space Paint by David Viner The Alpha Pavonis Meltdown by Philip Cahill Unspeakable Words by Philip Cahill The Case of Prickly Melon Poisoning by Jon Anthony Perrotti Gratitude by John Bowers This anthology is a collection of 13 new science fiction stories written by ten authors in four countries. All are members ...

With Veteran pay comes veteran problems. And the Guild, more often than not, is the issue. He’s become an effective enforcer of the law, but unfortunately, crime is growing a lot more complicated. Someone is slaving artificial beings to ships, running contraband across the stars in a fatal practice that marries murder, theft, and kidnapping. Even as Mark’s crew grows, he discovers these crimes aren’t just horrific—they’re common. And he means to stop it.

Desperate to earn enough to pay his creditors, the captain of the cargo ship, Despora, manages to land the haul of a lifetime. With some shady side dealing, he’s going to come out ahead. But he soon learns the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. And sometimes, the green isn’t grass at all.

In the darkest part of the solar system lies a wormhole. Nether. Astrophysicist Cammie Skoura has joined the first research team traveling to the Nether anomaly, eager to understand the mechanics of the wormhole and to explore its possibilities as a shortcut to Alpha Centauri. But another race of ancient beings has already been here—an impossibly long time ago—leaving remnants of their vast complexes and gigantic temples built for horrific beings beyond comprehension.

Meet Resilience, a Mars rover determined to live up to his name. Res was built to explore Mars. He was not built to have human emotions. But as he learns new things from the NASA scientists who assemble him, he begins to develop humanlike feelings. Maybe there’s a problem with his programming…. Human emotions or not, launch day comes, and Res blasts off to Mars, accompanied by a friendly drone helicopter named Fly. But Res quickly discovers that Mars is a dangerous place filled with dust storms and giant cliffs.

Transported to another world with purple alien barbarians who don’t even speak English?! Strange storms have been raging all over the world for the past months. Some say the end of the world is coming, but for Ella, life goes on as always: stressing about work, her health problems, and now a broken car to top it all off. She tries to make her way home in the stormy weather when a lightning suddenly strikes her. She loses consciousness and when she wakes up, she finds herself in the middle of a TV production. Because giant purple aliens just can’t be real, right? Especially not when they...

Sucked through a wormhole, Charlie's spaceship crash landed on a distant world, yet somehow he survived. But survival was about to get a lot harder as he found himself not just stranded on a new planet, but in another galaxy entirely. One ruled not by the laws of technology, but by magic. A realm of space pirates, deadly assassins, alien gladiators, and even dragons. For the spaceman from Earth, it was enough to make his head spin.

The Amazon rainforest holds a world-changing secret—a ship lost to time from another world. College student Will Kaufman unearthed the biggest archaeological discovery in human history… he just needs to find a way back to Earth to tell people about it. Four thousand years ago, a Federation bounty hunter Void ship crashed on a remote and primitive planet. There it remained until Will found it and accidentally reactivated it, launching him light-years away.

Astronaut Lee Rifkin's life is about to change. NASA has done the math. The space object named Cassandra 22007 is not behaving as expected. He will lead a team on a cutting-edge ship to get a closer look. But another group wants to get there first. Who is this shadow organization that seems to be one step ahead of them? Agent Jenna Haynes works to put together the pieces that will pull the veil off those who seem to have known about Cassandra's arrival since long before NASA spotted it. What is their goal?

Hired as a tutor and nanny to Prince Maxon’s son, Fiona packs her bags and goes to a planet where the people are every color of the rainbow. But life in the palace is anything but vibrant. The prince is a jerk. A jerk her hormones crave. His sexy body and deep gaze twist her emotions in knots, but she’s not falling for him. Prince Maxon has been training for the day to take the place of his father as king since birth. Long days of weapons training, war strategizing, and politics have kept him too busy to be a good father or loving partner. He doesn’t have time for the emotions that ...

Mysterious gateways are appearing throughout the universe, bridging violent civilizations, leading to war, and sowing chaos. While some species succumb to the pandemonium, the Chut’un forge an unholy symbiotic relationship—The Order—with red Europhids, a vast hive intelligence populating the universe’s far reaches. Desiring structure and fearing the unknown, they cull everything opposed to their plan, including the Europhids’ blue counterparts, carrying out a galactic genocide until only one blue Europhid remains...inside Moses Montgomery, a.k.a. "Dark Horse".

Disturbing the established order will mean kicking over a fair number of rocks, although Mark, Valint, and the others might be surprised by what scurries forth underneath—and what uniform it's wearing when it steps into the light. Mark Tudor will make the title Peacemaker mean something once again, but to do that, he'll have to face the worst the galaxy has to offer. Death waits in the quiet moments. And sometimes, it is a soldier's loved ones that pay the greatest price.

The star cluster is awash with the blood of those whose lives have been spent by two men maneuvering fleets like pieces across a chessboard. Only one man can come out on top: Thatcher or Moll.

Calamity, the digital plague, is spreading, and where it strikes is both ruthless and random. Fearful of the Earth being ravaged, Van and the crew go on high alert to keep his homeworld free of galactic influence. That vision is shattered when Tony Burgess captures an alien ship... in Wisconsin. The ship isn't just a stray workboat. It's the opening ploy of a group that sees humanity as a business opportunity too big to pass up. Advancing in rank, Van is torn between two duties—to his crew and to his home.

In the 1800s, a sailing ship crashes off the coast of Norway. In the 1900s, a Zepellin explores an icy canyon in Antarctica. In the far future, a spaceship sets out for an alien artifact. Each excursion goes horribly wrong. And on every journey, Dr. Silas Coade is the physician, but only Silas seems to realize that these events keep repeating themselves. And it's up to him to figure out why and how. And how to stop it all from happening again.

Stephanie Harrington didn’t discover treecats—they were indigenous to the planet Sphinx, a colony of the tiny Star Kingdom of Manticore. But at age ten she was the first human to bond with one. Now, almost 17, she is the species greatest champion. To the rest of the human galaxy, if they are known at all, they are recognized as tool using, socially organized, fuzzy little creatures, with no known method of communication—who also happen to be fierce hunters. But are they sapient?

Not every visitor to or from Earth has good intentions, and the Peacemakers are faced with an uncomfortable reality. The Earth is about to meet aliens. Some of the aliens are bringing goods to trade. And among those items are weapons. When a secret cabal of humans who want to exploit the Earth is revealed, Van has to decide how and where to fight this threat. Along the way, he reveals a secret history that began in the Great War—and ends with mass chaos on his home planet.

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonise the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there's a mission that's too dangerous - even suicidal - the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. Mickey signed on to escape from both bad debts and boredom on Midgard. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal...and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

Younger star and LGBTQIA+ advocate Nico Tortorella investigates love, sex, gender, addiction, family, fame, and fluidity through their personal story and the lens of their nonbinary identity. Expanding on themes explored on their popular podcast, The Love Bomb, Nico shares the intimate details of their romantic partnerships, the dysfunction of their loud but loving Italian family, and the mingling of their feminine and masculine identities into one multidimensional, sexually fluid, nonbinary individual.

What if first contact wasn’t the beginning… but the consequence of being remembered? In the late 22nd century, humanity reverse-engineers a crashed alien vessel buried beneath Antarctica. The result: the Acheron, Earth’s first interstellar ship, launched with a crew of soldiers, scientists, and secrets. But when they discover a distant Earth-like world—ravaged by war and ruled by a brutal galactic empire—the crew is mistaken for survivors of a long-dead civilization. Captured and interrogated, they must keep the truth hidden: that they come from a planet no one in the galaxy even ...