Gary Gibson – Editor

Against Gravity

Meet Kendrick Gallmon, one of the few survivors of the Maze.

The Maze: a covert research facility in which political prisoners became unwilling participants in an experiment designed to turn them into perfect soldiers.

Now, years after the war is over, Kendrick is trying to pick up the pieces of his old life. He doesn’t know how much time he has left, since he knows all too well that the unstable nanotech augmentations riddling his nervous system are slowly killing him the way they killed everyone else who walked out of the Maze alive.

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Stealing Light

For a hundred and fifty thousand years, the alien Shoal have been hiding a terrible secret behind a façade of power. In the twenty-fifth century, they dominate the galaxy and control all trade and exploration, possessing the secret of faster-than-light travel. Mankind has established just a handful of interstellar colonies; their freedom and knowledge of the galaxy limited by the Shoal’s punitive colonial charter.

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Nova War

Found adrift far from Consortium space, pilot Dakota Merrick and Lucas Corso are taken prisoner by the alien Bandati. There, Dakota discovers that humanity’s knowledge of the galaxy is frighteningly inaccurate. The Shoal has apparently been fighting a frontier war with a rival species, the Emissaries, for thousands of years. As yet, the latter seem unaware of their FTL technology’s full destructive capabilities. But the Bandati now have this information, and they will use it for profit.

Dakota realises, to her shock, that the Shoal may therefore hold the Galaxy’s best chance for peace. Forging an alliance with Trader, a Shoal-member, she’s determined to prevent the Bandati’s deadly knowledge from reaching the Emissaries. Yet despite her efforts, a nova war now seems inevitable – a war that will destroy millions of inhabited worlds.

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Empire of Light

The nova war spreads across the galaxy, as the Emissaries wage a fierce and reckless campaign. They’ve already reached human-occupied space and forced the alien Shoal into a desperate retreat. And when Dakota leaves to pursue a lead, Corso’s luck turns bad. Now commanding a fleet of human-piloted Magi ships, his authority crumbles before assassination attempts and politically motivated sabotage. Their best hope lies with Ty Whitecloud, currently light years beyond Consortium borders. Only Ty can decipher messages left behind by ancient star travellers – which could be crucial to their cause.

But Whitecloud is imprisoned onboard a dying coreship, awaiting execution for war crimes against Corso’s own people. For humanity’s very survival, Corso must get to Whitecloud and keep him alive. If Dakota doesn’t kill him first…

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Final Days

This new mode of transportation comes at a price and there are risks. Saul Dumont knows this better than anyone. He’s still trying to cope with the loss of the wormhole link to the Galileo system, which has stranded him on Earth far from his wife and child for the past several years.

Only weeks away from the link with Galileo finally being re-established, he stumbles across a conspiracy to suppress the discovery of a second, alien network of wormholes which lead billions of years in the future. A covert expedition is sent to what is named Site 17 to investigate, but when an accident occurs and one of the expedition, Mitchell Stone, disappears – they realise that they are dealing with something far beyond their understanding.

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The Thousand Emperors

Archivist Luc Gabion is dying, slowly, victim of a forced technology implant while on assignment. He brought down a powerful terrorist, but at great cost, and this new tech brings unexpected dangers.

Luc must investigate the Thousand Emperors, rulers of the Tian Di’s stellar empire. One of their number has been murdered and he needs to find the killer. But the technology he now carries supersedes anything he’s encountered, and Luc sees things he knows are forbidden. As the truth emerges, he’s in trouble. Any of these leaders could be guilty – and could execute him on a whim. Worse, the murder victim was brokering the coming Reunification. Two great warring civilisations, separated for centuries, due to unite in a new age of peace.

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Marauder

Pilot Megan Jacinth has three impossible goals. She has to find her friend Bash, who she left for dead to save her own life. She needs to locate a space-faring entity, using Bash to do so. Then she must unlock this Marauder’s ancient secrets. And if she doesn’t, millions will die. An alien incursion is coming, and the Marauder’s knowledge is the key to survival or annihilation.

When Megan finds Bash, he’s being held captive by Gregor Tarrant. Tarrant wants Megan dead – but not before he finds the entity himself, for his own dark goals. Megan is desperate to reach the Marauder first, but the price for unlocking its secrets may be too high. Megan should know, as she still bears the scars from their last encounter….

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Extinction Game

Jerry Beche should be dead. Instead, he’s rescued from a desolate Earth where he was the last man alive. He’s then trained for the toughest conditions imaginable and placed with a crack team of specialists on an isolated island. Every one of them is a survivor, as each withstood the violent ending of their own alternate Earth. And their new specialism? To retrieve weapons and data in missions to other apocalyptic versions of our world.

But what is ‘the Authority’, the shadowy organization that rescued Beche and his fellow survivors? How does it access timelines to find other Earths? And why does it need these instruments of death…

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Survival Game

Katya is a scientist, working on a classified project for the Russian Empire. She’s also desperate. Her bosses want to exploit her knowledge and send her on an incredible, dangerous mission. And if she refuses, her father’s life will be forfeit.

Katya must retrieve an artefact that will grant new life to the dying Russian tsar. She’s therefore being sent deep undercover on an alternate version of Earth, to an American-controlled island. Here Borodin, the tsar’s spymaster, will be watching her.

On the island Katya and Jerry, an American adventurer, form an uneasy alliance. They discover the artefact will call down terror from the depths of space, yet Katya’s superiors refuse to listen. But Katya and Jerry’s worlds face extinction, so the artefact must be destroyed – at any cost. Two civilizations depend upon it.

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Doomsday Game

Rozalia is a Pathfinder, dedicated to exploring parallel Earths where mankind has been wiped out. As a survivor of one such world, she’s seen every kind of apocalypse possible.

All she and her fellow Pathfinders want is a new home—both for themselves and for the organization that brought them together. Now, at last, they’ve found one: an untrammeled Eden where humanity never even evolved.

But just when it looks like their work is finally over, the Pathfinders find themselves confronted by new threats. Someone has been accessing an off-limits alternate in search of weapons that could destroy them all; samples of their most advanced—and dangerous—technology have been stolen from a research facility, and toxic rain is driving people crazy—which means she might be going crazy too…

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Scienceville & Other Lost Worlds

SCIENCEVILLE: a man draws a map of a city that doesn’t exist – or so he thinks, until someone who lived there comes calling.

SENSELESS: political prisoners of a near-future regime can have their sight and other senses back, but only if they cooperate with the state. One man plans escape, until a new arrival throws everything into disarray.

THE LONG FALL: Nadia Mirkowsky of EXTINCTION GAME and SURVIVAL GAME finds herself trapped in a post-apocalyptic parallel universe that might be the strangest she’s yet encountered.

GUATEMALA: a fading rock star is offered one last shot at the big time using a new, mind-altering technology – but the price may be higher than he thinks.

THE RANCH: any pleasure is yours, if you have the money – even your very own vampire lover. But for the vampires themselves, it’s a much more deadly affair…

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Ghost Frequencies

Susan MacDonald is desperate. Unless she makes a breakthrough soon, Ashford, the millionaire businessman financing her project, will shut it down and disband her research team. She knows she’s close – that she’s on the verge of proving her theory of Retrocausality, which will enable her to harness quantum mechanics to produce a revolutionary new form of instantaneous communication – but results are proving frustratingly elusive.

The last thing Susan needs is a team of ghost hunters moving into her base of operations, Ashford Hall – a building with a troubled past. Nor does she need the odd sounds – snatches of random conversation and even music – that are hampering her experiments; but does this interference represent the presence of ‘ghosts’ as some claim, deliberate sabotage as suggested by others, or is there an even more sinister explanation?

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Devil’s Road

Teijouan was a prosperous island-nation until the Event. Now it’s a post-apocalyptic wilderness rendered uninhabitable by a ‘derangement field’ that drives people crazy the closer they get to the Event’s epicenter.

Was it an alien visitation, a breakdown in the laws of physics, or an experiment gone wrong? No one sent to find out ever came back to tell.

Broken out of jail by an insane oligarch, Dutch McGuire—getaway driver, carjacker and all-round badass—is tasked with one mission: investigate the mystery at the heart of Teijouan in order to win her freedom. But as cover, she must once again take part in the Devil’s Run, a road race circumnavigating the island in which the participants are as likely to be murdered by each other as by the huge alien beasts roaming the wastelands.

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Tracer

A huge space station orbits the Earth, holding the last of humanity. It’s broken, rusted, falling apart. We’ve wrecked our planet, and now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that’s dirty, overcrowded and inescapable.

What’s more, there’s a madman hiding on the station. He’s about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there’ll be nowhere left to run.

In space, every second counts. Who said nobody could hear you scream?

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The Lost Puzzler

Among the ruins of a civilization beyond their understanding, humanity clings to survival. Guilds vie for control of ancient cities, bandits ride glowing highways, and cyborg adventurers hunt for lost technology. In the City of Towers, once the heart of the fallen Tarakan empire, a historian searches for clues to explain the disappearance of Rafik, a young boy with extraordinary abilities – a Puzzler.

Marked with strange tattoos and gifted with a miraculous connection to Tarakan technology, Rafik could open doors inside the ruins, uncovering treasures and secrets. As Rafik’s story is retold, it becomes clear that one lost boy may be the key to reviving a broken world or unleashing a new wave of devastation.

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