Tasha Ocasek is having the worst day of her life. First, her father forces her to meet the son of the ben Khalid ship-building cartel to secure a marriage contract. Then she gets stood up by ben Khalid, and sold off like a common whore to a psychopathic pharmaceutical magnate. Threatened with a life of drugged servitude, Tasha stows away on the first available ship.Garrick ben Khalid has returned from chasing smugglers and information on the corbies, derelict ships with zombielike ...

Sometimes getting in bed with the enemy gives you the edge you need...For Zonan Silvergard Commander Taryn Penthes, an assignment to escort a group of Bariani diplomats seems routine-until the party is ambushed. And when she realizes the attacker she just killed is the Zonan Crown Prince's lover, political winds shift. Now she's in a race to get the surviving diplomat to safety-while using whatever means necessary to find out what he knows.Blade Von Stassos isn't all that s...

Travertine Garcia is out of funds, out of options, and her air tax is due in the morning; you live on the moon, you pay for air. You can’t pay, you go looking for miracles, like the Bebop’s legendary open microphone, netcast by its equally legendary owner, Joseph Bannister.Bebop owner Joe “Glitch” Bannister is sleepwalking through his second life, tweaking the gang that wants payola and hacking for the Strike Force that put him back together after blowing him apart.Until Tr...

In the human Republic, Shakiro Nobinata wakes from life-saving surgery to discover he is paralyzed from mid-chest and re-growing several organs as well as his spinal cord. When his parents invite him home to the Empire of Nippon and Allied Cultures to finish his recovery, he jumps at the chance to end his decade-long exile.Then he discovers his father’s true motivation is a mysterious disappearance of a member of the royal family that he wants Shakiro to solve, before the Emperor h...

Alexei “Sasha” Davidoff has a problem. He’s babysitting Club Bebop and investigating a mysterious incident that might have been the root cause of his death, well, sort-of death, on Ganymede. And someone else is in the Mars police-sealed archive he’s searching, but he/she/it runs whenever he tries to make contact.Lucinda “Lucky” Burbank, multibillionaire Luther Burbank’s only heir, is broke and stuck on the moon, working two menial jobs to pay air tax and occasionally eat. It’s not ...

Always make sure your murder victim is truly dead…striker payback is usually with interest.Strike Force Colonel Rahmsin Singh is almost as much machine as man, and he wants to know the root cause. Unfortunately, the woman who can tell him that is in deep cryosleep...her body mostly a freeze-dried husk that's going to require a lot of regeneration, though her consciousness was protected.The last thing Chandra Ramasamy remembers is the burn of a bullet hitting her ch...

With no home, no family, and her grand plot an utter failure, Talyn Penthes emigrates to Garnford Major and goes back to her roots, remaking all those Zonan craft projects she was always pulled away from.Sharif Tanaka Six-Alpha is worried. One of five clones of the chief exec of the Hauptmann cartel, which essentially runs the Garnford system, the highest-tech of the Dozen Worlds, he knows there’s a problem in the R&D department, as there doesn’t seem to be any innovation happening...

Where do you hide in space?On the courier ship ferrying The Hero of Ararat, the Dragonkiller and their daughter, Ekaterina ‘Kat’ Avondale, from the Saurian homeworld back to human space, newly promoted third-shift commander Stephan Ocasek has found a sneaky ion trail. They are being followed. No, not followed, hunted.Not by Saurians, since they’re flying an honor escort. Not by humans, because the engine signature is all wrong. When they detect a comm signal that K...

They were strikers who fought from the Sol system network – hackers, gremlins, psychops, ghosts in the code.Then they were called in as peacekeepers when the Ganymede Mining employees revolted against the company, but a friendly fire hardware malfunction shelled their bodies. Luckily, they weren’t at home at the time, and their bodies could be repaired.Years later, they’re sleepwalking through life either in the service or retired from it, and a few good women…wake...

The writers featured in this anthology all hail from the great state of Idaho. No, not Iowa or Illinois or even Indiana. Idaho. The Gem State. Where the Father of Space Opera (E.E. "Doc" Smith), married his bride, and where the Center of the Universe can be found in an old mining town called Wallace.Over a dozen years ago, several Speculative Fiction writers in Boise found each other and coalesced into an informal support group. Thus, was born the Boise Spec-Fic Writers Group. We'v...

A paradise planet turns deadly. Can a professor and a sniper save his daughter and her friends from mercenaries and a cunning killer?When ex-military sniper and current personal security specialist Jerzi Adams visits his daughter Pico's quiet college on the paradise-like planet of Nila Marbela, he doesn’t expect emergency evacuations and rogue robots. Nor does he expect to renew a friendship with former squad-mate, who is now Pico’s teacher. And the last person Pic...

After tavern owner Rissa Dix rescues two girls from a slave ship, she must rally the townsfolk to prevent traffickers from raiding the frontier colony. She’s met with apathy and disbelief. Because she lost her own baby to traffickers, she’s determined that no other mother will suffer the same heartache. Industrialist heir Dillan Rusteran aids her in rescuing more children. Little do they know they’re about to tangle with a trafficking ring that puts Rissa in danger. Dillan’s loved her for ...