Showing titles in First Contact

Riley St. Claire has always followed her own rules. When she discovers her current employer is not as law-abiding as she thought, she has to leave town in a hurry...or end up buried with the dead guy she discovered. She doesn't expect to be picked up by a passing trader from another world. As the ruling king of Sarafin, Vox d'Rojah is expected to produce a son who will be joined in marriage with the first-born daughter of the king of Valdier.

Lydia works as translator for the Logi cultural attaché to Earth. They work well together, even if the act of translating his thoughts into English makes her somewhat wobbly on her feet. She’s not the agency’s best translator, but what else is she going to do? She has no qualifications and no discernible talent in any other field. So when tragedy strikes and Lydia finds herself at the center of an intergalactic incident, her future employment prospects look dire—that is, if she can keep herself out of jail!

Thomas Baldwin has been appointed captain of the state-of-the-art cruise ship Constantine, named after his heroic grandfather. When their first diplomatic mission turns deadly, all signs point to the return of a former adversary, one the Concord claims to have defeated five decades earlier. No one has seen Baldwin's commander, Treena Starling, since her previous ship was destroyed in a gruesome battle, leaving her the sole survivor. Can her secret help them rescue one of their crew members from captivity at the enemy's hands?

A civilization-destroying omega cloud has switched direction, heading straight for a previously unexplored planetary system--and its alien society. And suddenly, a handful of brave humans must try to save an entire world--without revealing their existence.

High above the windswept plains of Kazakhstan, three astronauts on board a Russian Soyuz capsule begin their reentry. A strange shimmer in the atmosphere, a blinding flash of light, and the capsule vanishes in a blink as though it never existed. Daniel Rice is a government science investigator. Marie Kendrick is a NASA operations analyst. Together, they must track down the cause of the most bizarre event in the history of human spaceflight. They draw on scientific strengths as they plunge into the strange world of quantum physics.

For more than a century, Winged Hussars has been the richest of Earth's mercenary companies, as well as the only one to specialize in space warfare. Led by Alexis Cromwell, they have carved out a reputation in the galaxy for being dependable, unflappable, and lethally efficient. Until people began shooting at them everywhere they went.

Commander David Bryce is scheduled to lead a routine re-supply run for the Orbital Development Group (ORB) to the fledgling colony on Mars. Without warning, he’s taken away by government agents and told the mission parameters have changed. They’ve discovered something. And it’s drifting closer to Earth. Atlas Donovan tirelessly hunts for an artifact, and tracks the piece to Lake Como, Italy. After the recent news from ORB, Atlas is more drawn to the trail than ever.

After the vicious attacks on Victoria Bravo, Commander Tara Mason and the newly formed Force 25 have no time to refit and reconstitute their depleted forces. Deputized by the Peacemaker Guild and charged with a time-sensitive mission - finding James “Snowman” Francis - Tara and her mercenaries deploy to the wintry world of Snowmass to follow a 50-year-old lead on Snowman’s disappearance. Snowmass, though, is far from peaceful.

From the moment Sam Newman and fourteen others awaken inside metal coffins next to the burning wreckage of a spacecraft, they face a constant struggle to stay alive on a seemingly uninhabited planet light-years from home. Worse, the last any of them remember, they were back home on Earth—at a time when interstellar travel was little more than a distant pipe dream. Survival means finding out who-or what-brought them to this place. Yet what few answers they find amidst the steaming jungles and the ruins of that distant world defy all logic or sanity.

A vrisha arrives in Grace's underwater city. He takes over one of the substations, forcing the workers out. At the whim of her job, Grace is unwillingly chosen to go below, maintain the station, and stay with the horned, devilish alien. That is how she comes to encounter Xora. An alien born from a race of dominant fighters and fierce hunters. He is as terrifying as he is mysterious. While also commanding, stubborn, unrelenting...and oddly mesmerizing. As her fear slips away, other emotions begin to take hold. And Grace finds she wants to know more.

Jon Ryan has some unfinished business. Since he caused the universe to reboot, well, he can't seem to find his wife of two billion years. That's one great big oops. He also can't find the massive time ship Aramthella and her human crew. Double oops. And then there's the matter of not knowing whey why there are several copies of key people in the new reality he must navigate. Triple oops. He actually knows one whole heck of a lot less about his current situation than seems healthy. But he's Jon Ryan, former fighter pilot turned android warrior for humankind.

In 1349, one small town in Germany disappeared and was never resettled. Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical-physicist girlfriend, Sharon, become interested. By all logic, the town should have survived, but it didn't. Why? What was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years ago?

Silas is inducted into the System, becoming the last in a long line of Earth's "forerunners." The rewards are great, but the danger is greater. We are not alone in the universe. The fate of five worlds hangs on how their forerunners perform. Will Silas have what it takes to win Earth a place in the multiverse? Or will Earth become another mining world stripped of all resources and left a barren husk floating in the cosmos?

River Knight was looking forward to a peaceful vacation in the mountains with her two best friends, Jo and Star, sisters of the heart. When she travels up into the mountains of North Carolina to the cabin Star has rented for them, she is shocked when she finds the two sisters being abducted. Following them, she discovers their abductors are anything but human. Sneaking aboard the shuttle in an attempt to rescue them, she finds herself on an unplanned vacation to the stars.

During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first she’s delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move. As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation. First contact isn’t at all what she imagined, and events push her to the very limits of what it means to be human. While Kira faces her own horrors, Earth and its colonies stand upon the brink of annihilation. Now, Kira might be humanity’s greatest and final hope....

The TDF Marco Polo embarks on its maiden voyage outside Earth's solar system, leading to the discovery of an extinct civilization destroyed by orbital bombardment. Deep underground is a mysterious library of alien secrets.

In the year 2255, of all the sentient beings in her universe, it was a woman named Salma, twenty years old, who was the first fully to see the object called Planet Nine. See with her own eyes, albeit moderated by her ship's instruments. If not to recognise what it was, not yet. Not that the object turned out to be a planet, or the 'ninth' of anything. Briefly thought to be a black hole, it suddenly changes, expands and sends a message. There is something waiting on its service. Something not quite human.

Following his mission on Cappa, Colonel Carl Butler returns to a mixed reception. To some, he is a do-or-die war hero. To the other half of the galaxy, he’s a pariah. Forced into retirement, he has resettled on Talca Four where he’s now Deputy VP of Corporate Security, protecting a high-tech military company on the corporate battlefield - at least, that’s what the job description says. Really, he’s just there to impress clients and investors. It’s all relatively low risk - until he’s entrusted with new orders.

For Flight Engineer Cynthia Han and her fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 81 has proved as mundane as space travel ever gets. Yes, this would be Cynthia’s final NASA mission, for reasons she has so far kept from the rest of the crew; and yes, the latest billionaire “space tourist” has managed to irritate everyone on board. Still, none of them could have asked for a smoother experience. Until the morning they wake up to silence. All communication with Earth, gone.

With no surface water, Harat Zuwayyah barely supports any life at all. The scorching wind howls across the desert, driving the sand and threatening to bury the village. Professor Susan Taylor is excavating an Egyptian tomb dated to 4500 BCE. She uncovers the mummified remains of a wealthy family that died on the trade route, revealing insights into a lost culture, but it's the talisman watching over the grave that causes her heart to race.