Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Hard Science Fiction

Nine hundred thousand years ago, something annihilated the Amarantin civilization just as it was on the verge of discovering space flight. Now one scientist, Dan Sylveste, will stop at nothing to solve the Amarantin riddle before ancient history repeats itself. With no other resources at his disposal, Sylveste forges a dangerous alliance with the cyborg crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity. But as he closes in on the secret, a killer closes in on him because the Amarantin were destroyed for a reason.

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a law enforcement officer with the Panoply. His beat is the multifaceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, the teeming hub of a human interstellar empire spanning many worlds. His current case: investigating a murderous attack against one of the habitats that left 900 people dead, a crime that appalls even a hardened cop like Dreyfus.

A mysterious object threatens to destroy our solar system. The survival of humankind is at risk, but nobody takes the warning of young astrophysicist Maribel Pedreira seriously. At the same time, an exiled crew of outcasts mines for rare minerals on a lone asteroid. When other scientists finally acknowledge Pedreira's alarming discovery, it becomes clear that these outcasts are the only ones who may be able to save our world, knowing that the Hole hurtles inexorably toward the sun.

Years have passed since Earth encountered its first known interstellar object: Oumuamua. Now an even larger one has been discovered, following the exact same trajectory as its predecessor. Scientists around the world theorize that this can no longer be passed off as mere coincidence - the new contact must be an artificial construct of some kind.

In a world half of light, half of darkness, where science and magic strive for dominance, there dwells a magical being who is friendly with neither side. Jack, of the realm of shadows, is a thief who is unjustly punished. So he embarks on a vendetta.

The witnesses are legion, scattered across the world and dotted through history, people who looked up and saw something impossible lighting up the night sky. What those objects were, where they came from, and who - or what - might be inside them is the subject of fierce debate and equally fierce mockery, so that most who glimpsed them came to wish they hadn't. Most, but not everyone.

Mark Victor was a soldier left broken after the Harmony War ended. What can a broken ex-trooper really do? What are they good for if they've gone through the EMF and been tossed out the other side? If you were to ask Mark...Maybe, doing what the enemy couldn't and following his brothers and sisters. Mark wakes up to a nightmare, to an unfamiliar place with unknown faces. A planet under attack, an enemy he's never seen before. He just wants to escape, but when he sees others in danger, he realizes that a trooper stands for something; they stand to protect their own. No matter the cost.

Daniel Rice is a government science investigator whose specialty is solving seemingly intractable problems through scientific inquiry. But Daniel's intellectual strength is sorely tested by the bizarre realities he finds in the quantum world. Extra dimensions of space trap the unwary, probability replaces cause and effect, and time isn't what anyone imagined. The other side of the mirror is a place full of dangers, but it's also somewhere a dedicated scientist can uncover secrets that connect humans with something greater.

Sera leads a simple life. A little smuggling, some drinking contests, and captaining her star freighter, Sabrina. But when she picks up a mysterious shipping container on Coburn Station, things begin to go wrong. She finds herself at odds with The Mark, a dangerous pirate organization that wants the cargo on her ship. Inside the container she not only finds a woman, but a secret thought lost millennia ago.

Noah Parker, a newly minted PhD, is thrilled to land a dream job at Reptilian Corp., the hottest tech company in the American Southwest. He's eager to put his genetic engineering expertise to use designing new lines of Reptilian's feature product: living, breathing dragons. Although highly specialized dragons have been used for industrial purposes for years, Reptilian is desperate to crack the general retail market. By creating a dragon that can be the perfect family pet, Reptilian hopes to put a dragon into every home. But Noah has a secret goal....

Late in the 26th century, the human race has advanced enough to accidentally trigger the Inhibitors---alien-killing machines designed to detect intelligent life and destroy it. The only hope for humanity lies in the recovery of a secret cache of doomsday weapons---and a renegade named Clavain who is determined to find them. But other factions want the weapons for their own purposes---and the weapons themselves have another agenda altogether.

The fate of humanity lies on the shoulders of Burt Radcliffe, the new head of NASA's Near Earth Object program. He's been rushing the completion of DefenseNet, a ring of satellites that are both part of an early-warning system, as well as the means to eliminate incoming threats. Yet Burt knows that despite the world's best efforts, nothing can be done about the alert he's just received. Coming out of deep space is a danger that's been approaching since the dawn of time. A black hole. An unstoppable threat that promises death for all in its wake.

The first of the acclaimed Vatta's War books, the exciting military science fiction series that features a swashbuckling spaceship-captain heroine who mixes commerce with combat.

A world recovering from a devastating plague. A brutal enemy threatening invasion. A young man seeking to escape the shadow of his father. A ship manned by a crew of fresh academy graduates. A top-secret experimental propulsion system. A questionable alliance with a mysterious green-eyed woman. What destiny has in store for the crew of the UES Aurora is far greater than any of them could ever imagine. And this is only the beginning....

Daniel Rice hasn't felt right since his return from a dystopian future. Curious dreams repeat with detailed precision. A voice—or something—seems to be calling him. His problem isn't medical, it's not even scientific, and it's driving his wife crazy. Nala is worried, and she's not the type to pace the halls while her overly analytic husband procrastinates. Earth's scientific power couple is soon halfway around the world to consult with alien android, Aastazin. Zin is no doctor, but he has friends in high places.

The Hygrometric Dehabitation Region, or the "Zone," is a growing band of rainforest on the equator, where the heat and humidity make it impossible for warm-blooded animals to survive. A human being without protection in the Zone is dead in minutes. Twenty years ago, Marks went into the rainforest with a group of researchers led by Doctor Elaine Fell, to study the extraordinary climate and see if it could be used in agriculture. The only thing she learned was that the Zone was no place for people. There were deaths, and the program was cut short. Now, they're sending her back in.

What if mankind's "missing link", the apelike Homo erectus, had survived to dominate a North American continent where woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers still prowled while the more advanced Homo sapiens built their civilizations elsewhere? Now imagine that the Europeans arriving in the New World had chanced on these primitive creatures and seized the opportunity to establish a hierarchy in which the sapiens were masters and the "sims" were their slaves.

The greatest scientific challenge of our age wasn't to enable time travel, it was to prevent it. The laws of physics had turned out to be idiotic, erecting no barriers to hopping time. In fact, they make it hard to avoid. I'm in the business of preserving the timeline - making sure the world sticks to the sacred rule of One Second per Second, and that history unfolds according to plan. The problem is, there is no plan until I make it.

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.

Brought together by fate - or phenomena - heiress Jennifer Quinn, journalist Timika Mars, pilot Alan Young, and ex-Marine Barry Regis are bonded by the incidents they've witnessed, hunted by agents of a wealthy corporate cabal desperate for unimaginable power, and possessed of extraordinary abilities they do not understand, much less control. Now, they're on a mission of their own. As Alan and Barry test the limits of their strange gifts inside the military complex known as Dreamland, Jennifer and Timika begin a quest to locate an ancient tablet that may hold the answers to humanity's greatest question.