Welcome to Crooked, the first volume of a new anthology series from Bad Intentions Press.You'll find Teppo's retrieval job gone very, very wrong (or has it?). You'll find Eric Warren's gunrunner getting a second chance and Greg Dragon's smuggler surviving on the edge. Jessie Kwak's bodyguard dealing with a simple job that got quite complicated, Kate Sheeran Swed's unlikely bounty hunter getting her feet underneath her, and Wade Peterson's fighting bot showing its fiercely loyal hea...

Arista is not who she seems.Every day she blends in with everyone else, going about her mundane life, all in a desperate attempt to obscure the truth: she's the last human on the planet.Until an accident burns her arm off.Scarred and on the run, she's hunted by Peacemakers, autonomous machines designed to eliminate all human life.But the Cadre, a cabal of machines who keep the world order, need to understand where she came from if they're to maintain the sta...

Trying Times Ahead.The crew of the USCS Tempest may have escaped near death near the Excel Nebula, but their journey is just beginning.As Caspian tries to find his place among the crew on their journey to unknown space, Evie is haunted by ghosts of her past. Both of them will have to work together if they want to find out what's going on with the threat known only as Andromeda.Meanwhile, light years beyond where any Coalition ship has ever ventured,...

He needs a payday. He’ll settle for payback.Betrayed and left to rot on the edges of the galaxy, Caspian Robeaux is deep in debt and stuck flying courier missions in an old rustbucket he can barely keep afloat. His only friends are an annoying robot named Box and a bottle of booze.It’s a far cry from his once-promising military career, but Cas stopped caring a long time ago.Things start to look up, though, when a stranger arrives and offers a lucrat...

She thought she was alone. When it's all over, she'll wish she was.Arista and Frees, having beaten the AI known as Charlie, now face new troubles. The Peacekeepers are still hunting the teenager and her autonomous friend as they try to release other machines from the Cadre's grasp. And the worst part is, they're still no closer to finding the secret to Arista's heritage.But when a mysterious call interrupts their fleeting attempts at liberating the machines—from someone cla...

Arista once dreamed of a planet full of humans. Now it scares her to death.After the disastrous events at the human colony, Arista's reality has been turned upside down and she finds herself in a world in which the machines never came to power, and, in fact, are outlawed.Now she and Frees must try and navigate this strange, new universe without getting killed by some anti-artificial nutjob. The only question is: without a Quantum Gate, how do they get back?After she...

The Past doesn’t easily Forgive. Or Forget.Distraught over the loss of his crewmates, Caspian Robeaux no longer believes he can pretend to be part of the crew of the USCS Tempest. He has to face the fact he’s become an outsider and that’s who he’ll always be. He has no place on a Coalition starship anymore. But the mission must continue and until it’s complete, he’s stuck on board. Will he find a way to cope, or will the ghosts of his mistakes drive him ...

It was just supposed to be one job. But once the Coalition has you, they never let go…Caspian Robeaux thought his troubles were over when he disrupted the Coalition’s plans and the person who had betrayed him found himself behind bars.But life is rarely so simple.Now the Coalition has a new mission for him, one that takes him right back into the heart of the enemy who helped cost him his freedom.The question is, can he step up to the challen...

After a lifetime of searching for answers, Arista finds herself facing what could be her greatest fear: that humanity might be her enemy.Together with her machine companion Frees, Arista locates a group of humans who are hunting down the remaining Peacemakers, only to learn the humans are part of a much larger, hidden colony, deep underground.Desperate to find out if this is where she came from, Arista will go to any length to gain access to the colony, even fighting her ow...

Let the End...Try the Man.Battle lines have been drawn, and forces have been gathered. But are Cas, Evie and the rest of the crew of the USCS Tempest ready to engage the deadliest enemy they’ve ever had to face? The Athru came into Coalition space, wiped out humanity and disassembled the once-great galactic empire piece by piece. But why? What lies behind this obsessive need to destroy humanity?While Evie fights to find out, Cas is done playing g...

It has all come down to this.Stuck in an alternate universe while a resurrected Charlie wreaks havoc in their own, Arista and Frees are desperate to return home to stop him. Their only problem: they don't have a Quantum Gate.But their new allies are clever, and if they play their cards just right, they might find a way home after all. What they'll discover after being away for months is anyone's guess.It turns out things are worse than they ever could have imagined....

This study develops a methodology for rapidly obtaining approximate estimates of the economic consequences from numerous natural, man-made and technological threats. This software tool is intended for use by various decision makers and analysts to obtain estimates rapidly. It is programmed in Excel and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to facilitate its use. This tool is called E-CAT (Economic Consequence Analysis Tool) and accounts for the cumulative direct and indirect impacts (includi...