Showing results for "Steve White" in Science Fiction

Afterwards, Basil Castellan was always certain that it had all begun the day he'd been rescued by the dragon. Oh, it hadn't been a real dragon, of course, or so he hastily assured everyone to whom he told the story. Only...it had been a real dragon....The Empire had preserved peace and order throughout human-inhabited space, but it had grown weak with the passing of the centuries, and now the self styled New Humans were rising in open rebellion, striving to seize control and impose their fanatical grand design on all humans everywhere.

When the Lokaron suddenly appeared in the skies of Earth, America was enjoying victory in the off-and-on war that had occupied most of the 20th century. That's why they chose America to occupy and use as their puppet in dominating the planet. We were already set up to do it; now we would do it for them. Not that they were evil; they just insisted that we trade with them. By their rules, rules backed up by irresistible weapons. In terms of those rules, they would even play fair - but in the long run, if they didn't own something, it would be because they didn't want it.

Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority had about had it with nursemaiding parties of ivory-tower academics through Earth's blood-drenched history, keeping them alive as they sought evidence for their pet theories. Of course, when one of the ivory-tower academics looked like Doctor Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez, one last expedition didn't look like such a bad idea after all...

Spacers call the warp point Charon's Ferry. No star ship has ever entered it and returned since a vengeful Orion task force pursued a doomed Terran colonization fleet into it in 2206. Almost a century has passed. The fiery hatreds of a quarter-century of warfare between the Terran Federation and the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaieeee, the cat-like species humans called the "Orions", have eased at least a little.

Five thousand years after Sun Tzu writes The Art of War, his advice is followed during the Fourth Interstellar War between the terrible Bugs and the humans, who are aided by their catlike Orion allies.

The mind-numbingly alien Arachnids were an enemy whose like no civilized race had ever confronted. Like some carnivorous cancer, the "Bugs" had overrun planet after planet...and they regarded any competing sentient species as only one more protein source. They couldn't be reasoned with, or even talked to, because no one had the least idea of how to communicate with a telepathic species with no recognizable language...and whose response to any communication attempt was a missile salvo.

The war with the profoundly alien Arduans has ended, and the Arduans have come to call humanity their allies. Most of them - the Arduan warrior caste refuses to accept defeat. Now known as the Kaituni, they are waging a war of extermination against all members of the pan-Sentient Union, human and Arduan alike. What's more, the Kaituni have an unexpected weapon in their arsenal: the alien Arachnids, once thought driven to extinction. The Kaituni drive the Arachnid fleet ahead of them, inflicting untold damage.

The war with the Arduans - profoundly alien invaders who originally arrived in STL ships - is over. Most of those attackers are now probationary (and very productive) citizens of the Rim Federation. However, many among the Arduans' warrior caste have accepted neither defeat nor the personhood of any of the other intelligence races. Their leader, the ruthless admiral of the second Arduan exodus, Amunsit, is in firm control of the Zarzuela system.

Long ago, much of the population of an entire planet fled their world before its sun went nova in thousands of ships, each one larger than a city. Now, the armada has arrived at the world they intend to make their new home. They regard the fact that the planet is already colonized by humans as a mere inconvenience, and their mode of communication is so different from anything humans use that they do not consider humans and their allies to be truly intelligent.

From the dawn of history onward, commanding the most powerful ship around has been a dream of admirals, sultans, emperors, kings, generalissimos, and sea captains everywhere. For what the intimidation factor alone doesn't achieve, a massive barrage from super-weapons probably will.

An implacable foe with telepathic cohesion in battle, near immortality, and eons-advanced engineering skills threatens to wipe humanity from the galaxy. What's more, they've overcome their one weakness - no faster-than-light travel - and have followed humanity through our star gates and beyond. But humans are the master of adaption and have got a counterpunch of devastating proportions in reserve.

In the end, the only political systems that seem to work are those based on freedom. The Inner World leaders of the Terran Federation seem to have forgotten this simple truth. After fighting the Khanate - with the Fringe Worlds to supply the raw material and the fighting men - the Inner Worlds found it hard to give up the powers they had seized during the war.

When Derek Secrest was suddenly pulled out of Naval flight officer school to take part in a top secret government project involving telepathy - because tests showed that he had a strong latent talent for psi powers - he thought things couldn't get weirder. He was wrong. Soon, he was contacted by a mysterious woman who could open portals at will through spacetime. Her powers seemed godlike - and they were. Millennia ago, extra-dimensional beings with great powers had come to Earth and taken on human form, remembered in legends as gods and goddesses.

Special Operations Officer Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority must once again plunge into Earth's blood-drenched past to combat the plots of the Transhumanist underground to subvert that past and create a secret history leading up to the fulfillment of their mad dream of transforming humanity into a race of gods and monsters.

Jason Thanou has fought for the continued existence of humanity across the centuries. As a special operations officer of the Temporal Regulatory Authority, he's traveled though time to thwart the Transhumanists - genetically and mechanically enhanced beings that seek to destroy humanity - and their alien allies, the Teloi. But for all his work, the Transhumanist Underground has never been defeated. In possession of the same time travel technology as the Temporal Regulatory Authority, the Transhumanists have been busy planting "time bombs" throughout recorded history.

The transhumanists are attempting to use the chaos of the American Civil War to escape the Observer Effect: the immutable law that recorded history cannot be changed. If any should attempt it, time has a way of dealing with those transgressors in a very brutal, very final fashion. Now it is the last days of the Confederacy, and the Fall of Richmond looms. In the Shenandoah Valley, in the region later known as Mosby's Confederacy, insurgency brews, and the time travelers must join the raiders to prevent a transhumanist trap from dooming the mission from the start.

Often hired by a secret government agency to do undercover work, Bob Devaney was escorting a mysterious woman named Novak to the White House when they were ambushed by gunmen. Novak used a device like an invisibility field to make an impossible escape - and then knocked Devaney out with some kind of ray-tube. When he woke up, Novak was about to terminate him for knowing too much, but a message arrived from a mysterious individual known as Mr. Inconnu: Devaney was to be recruited for something called the Prometheus Project. The Project turned out to be the largest disinformation operation in history, targeted at the aliens who ruled the galaxy.

Special operations officer Jason Thanou of the Temporal Regulatory Authority must once again plunge into Old Earth's blood-drenched past to combat the plots of the Transhumanist underground to subvert that past and create a secret history leading up to the fulfillment of their mad dream of transforming humanity into a race of gods and monsters. Jason and his companions travel to the 17th century to encounter the real pirates of the Caribbean - including a beautiful she-pirate who turns out to be Transhumanist renegade.

In our universe, Ponce de Leon is remembered for his fruitless search for the mythical fountain of youth. But, in an alternate universe, his quest found something very different - and very dangerous. Eighty-five years later, Spain sent a fleet of ships against England. The English were confident that they could repel the threat - but England's fleet was annihilated by weapons shooting beams of fiery light, weapons which seemed to employ the blackest of sorcery, even if they were wielded by odd-looking beings in monk's garb.

In an alternate future where the British empire never crumbled, the spaceships of Her Majesty’s Navy work to keep the spaceways safe. But there are those among the stars who are not so happy being subjects of the British Empire. In the Tau Ceti system, a cauldron of trouble brews as a terrorist faction of the rebellious Sons of Arnold attacks the empire from within, and warships of the theocratic Caliphate enter the system, prepared to do their worse to destroy the hated empire head-on.