Brand-new stories · 67 stories
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Twenty Grom expeditions have landed on Earth, and not one has ever reported back. Pid the Pilot means for the twenty-first to be different. His mission is to slip a Displacer into an atomic power plant so the Grom armies can step across space and take the pla…
Ciaran is a wandering harper and a thief, and Mouse is a branded thief with a temper and a good throwing arm. Between them they have never had a full belly or a roof over their heads. Camped above the Forbidden Plains, they watch a shadow spread across the sk…
Eric John Stark can spend twenty years in the Luna cell-blocks, or he can ride into Valkis as a spy for the man who once pulled him out of a cage. Simon Ashton, the lawman who raised him, runs him down in the Martian desert and makes the offer. Stark takes it…
Peter Claney is the only man who has ever tried to cross the sun side of Mercury and come back alive, and he has the scars to prove it. Now James Baron is planning the same trek at perihelion, and Claney turns up at the Red Lion to tell him exactly why it can…
Twins Tom and Greg Hunter haven't spoken in a year, but the news from the Asteroid Belt drags them into the same room. Their father, Roger Hunter, has died alone between Mars and Jupiter when the fuel tank on his scooter exploded. The U.N. calls it an acciden…
Bron Hoddan grew up on Zan, a planet of space pirates who swear they are simple farmers, and he has spent two years trying to become a respectable engineer on super-civilized Walden. Then he breaks into a power station to prove his new receptor works, a dead…
Alfric of Aslak rides into Valkarion looking for work for his sword, and before he reaches the gate, Temple slaves try to kill him with poisoned darts. Valkarion is the last withered remnant of a once-mighty empire, perched above a dead sea-bottom, and tonigh…
Hugh Starke pulls off the biggest payroll robbery in history, crashes beyond the Mountains of White Cloud, and wakes up dying, until a green-haired woman offers him a new body. He opens his eyes in chains, wearing the huge, scarred frame of Conan, a traitor e…
Vye Lansor is mopping up after a knife fight in the Starfall, the lowest dive on Nahuatl, when a stranger buys him a drink and offers him a future. Vye doesn't know the cup is drugged, or that the stranger, Ras Hume, is a crippled star pilot with a grudge who…
Burl has never seen the sun. On a cloud-wrapped world the galaxy forgot, the descendants of a wrecked liner's passengers live like hunted animals among giant mushrooms, deadly spores and insects the size of cattle, without fire, metal or any memory of where t…
Norman Saylor, a rising professor of ethnology at small, stuffy Hempnell College, has never snooped in his wife's dressing room before. When he does, he finds little bottles of graveyard dirt labeled with names, and soon charms tucked all over the house. Tans…
Shann Lantee, the lowest hand on a Terran Survey team, survives the Throg raid that wipes out his camp only because he was up in the hills chasing two escaped wolverines. Now the beetle-like raiders hold Warlock, and Shann, Taggi and Togi are alone on a world…
For fifty dollars, Keawe buys a bottle that will grant any wish, and the man who sells it cannot get him out of the door fast enough. An imp lives in the milk-white glass. It can give love, fame, money or a house like a palace, but it cannot lengthen life, an…
Six years ago someone robbed the Dosey Asteroids Shipping Station of a hundred million credits in star hyacinths and left seventy-nine people dead of something other than the bullet wounds in their bodies. Now Wellan Dasinger is heading for the place the loot…
Cappen Varra, a red-haired minstrel from golden Croy, came north to sing for the barbarians of Norren and has regretted it ever since. Now he is freezing on King Svearek's ice-crusted longship in a winter storm when a fire glimmers on a lonely island. Trolls…
Corun of Conahur, the most feared pirate on the seas of Achaera, is finally in chains and bound for the headsman, until the Thalassocrat's sorcerer offers him a way out. Shorzon and his granddaughter Chryseis, a witch as beautiful as she is cruel, need a guid…
In seven hours the Seventh Star Hotel, a fading pleasure resort floating where three shipping lanes cross, is scheduled to blow up with twelve thousand people aboard. Reetal Destone knows it, and when she spots Quillan's name on the guest list, she calls him…
Kull of Atlantis took the throne of Valusia with his sword, and now an old enemy is warning him that the kingdom is being stolen from within. Ka-nu, the cunning ambassador of the Picts, invites the barbarian king to a secret meeting and sends his fiercest war…
Bordman, a senior Colonial Survey officer who lives by specifications, comes to the desert mining world of Xosa II expecting a routine final inspection. Instead his ship cannot land. A sandstorm has buried the colony's half-built landing grid, and all its ste…
The Mekinese fleet is coming to swallow the planet Kandar, and young Captain Bors is burning state secrets so the conquerors will find nothing worth reading. Then a space-yacht lands carrying a stout, cheerful man named Morgan and his daughter Gwenlyn, offeri…
Burk Winters was a starship captain until the girl he meant to marry flew out over the Martian desert and never came back. Now he is a shaking wreck with one reason left to return to Kahora Port. In the Trade City, Shanga is the newest fashionable vice: an ol…
Race Cargill has spent six years behind a desk in Terran Intelligence, his face scarred and a death sentence on his name outside the Trade City walls on Wolf. On the night he finally leaves the planet, they pull him off the starship. His sister Juli has come…
Will Barrent wakes up on a prison ship with no memory, no past and one fact to go on: he has been convicted of murder. His new home is Omega, the planet where Earth dumps its criminals. In the city of Tetrahyde, status is everything and the quickest way up is…
Stark's friend Helvi sailed into Shuruun and never came back, so Stark goes after him, and the crew of the boat that carries him there tries to take him before it docks. Shuruun is a fog-bound nest of wreckers and smugglers on the Red Sea of Venus, an ocean o…
Brion Brandd has just won the Twenties, a month of brutal contests that makes him champion of his world, when a man named Ihjel drags him out of his hospital bed. Ihjel has a job only Brion can do. On Dis, a scorched desert planet, humans have adapted to the…
Terra has spent a century bottled up by the decaying Centauran Empire, and the SRB computers finally say the odds are turning. Security Commissioner Reinhart is ready for war, and Peter Sherikov's labs under the Urals are close to the weapon that could break…
Gefty Rammer took the charter for the money and didn't ask questions. Now his tough old semifreighter, the Silver Queen, has been knocked clean out of normal space into a black void where the instruments make no sense. His client, Mr. Maulbow, is unconscious,…
There are two roads to Torkertown, and the villagers beg Solomon Kane to take the long one through the swamps. The short road crosses a bare upland moor, and for a year no one who walked it by night has come back alive. Late travelers hear terrible laughter o…
Sandra Lea Grayling knows nothing about chess, and she has just talked her paper into sending her to the first grandmaster tournament with a computer in the field. The hall is packed with Russian champions, the brash American boy wonder Willie Angler, the thu…
Hunting a Martian is illegal now, which is exactly why Riordan wants to do it. A shipping magnate and big-game hunter who has bagged trophies from Mercury to Pluto, he comes to Port Armstrong for the one quarry he has never taken. The trader Wisby points him…
In a moonlit valley Solomon Kane finds a dying girl, and with her last breath she names the man who killed her: Le Loup, the Wolf. Kane is a gaunt English Puritan with a rapier, a brace of pistols and an iron sense of justice, and he does not swear oaths. He…
Garin Featherstone is a war-hero pilot with no war left to fight, until the explorer Gregory Farson hires him to fly into a strange blue haze rising from the Antarctic ice. Garin's plane goes down inside it. He wakes in Tav, a hidden crater world where a scho…
Elak is a wolf-faced swordsman drinking and brawling his way along the waterfront of Poseidonia when a Druid's white fire saves him from a sea captain's blade. Dalan the Druid brings grim news. Elak's brother Orander, king of Cyrena in the north of Atlantis,…
On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt wakes up screaming from a dream of an explosion, and the day only gets stranger. The cigarette stand sells a brand he has never heard of, the elevator plays jingles for products nobody knows, and all of Tylerton see…
Jason dinAlt is a gambler who wins whenever he wants to, and tonight a stranger wants him to turn twenty-seven million credits into three billion. The stranger is Kerk Pyrrus, and the money is meant to buy weapons for his home world. Pyrrus has double gravity…
Outlaw pilot Roy Campbell has the Spaceguard on his tail and a price on his head, and the only people who ever took him in are about to vanish. The Kraylens, a dying tribe of the Venusian swamps, call him their almost-son. Now the Terra-Venusian Coalition pla…
On the night Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz, has dreaded for years, two silent figures in black wake him and lead him down a stairway he never knew existed beneath his castle. His dying father would not name the curse an abbot laid on their house, after th…
Five years after the clans of Killorn left their purple hills, Red Bram's band marches into war-torn Ryvan and straight into an army out of the Dark Lands. The invaders are gaunt, silent, golden-eyed men from the country of endless night. Kery son of Rhiach c…
Slippery Jim diGriz is one of the last real criminals in a galaxy so orderly that crime has nearly died out, and he is proud of it. Then the Special Corps finally catches him, and its chief, Harold Peters Inskipp, makes him an offer: put those talents to work…
Memphir, empire of empires, burns below the mountain, and Varta, last Maiden of Asti, is the only one left to obey her god's final command. She lifts the tiny sun and its four worlds from the stone hand of Asti, puts on an ancient suit of lizard skin, and goe…
Solomon Kane does not like the look of the Cleft Skull, a lonely tavern deep in the Black Forest with barred windows, no other guests and a host with small red eyes. He shares the night's lodging with Gaston l'Armon, a dandified Frenchman who overtook him on…
Huyghens is the only human on Loren Two, a world closed to settlement because of the sphexes, and his outpost there is completely illegal. He shares it with Semper, a bald eagle, and four mutated Kodiak bears who have learned to fight sphexes on their own ter…
Cororuc, a young Briton making his way home alone from a secret mission to the wild Cornish tribes, cuts through a silent forest where no birds sing. There he saves a strange wolf from a panther, takes the head of the bandit chief Buruc the Cruel, and flees a…
When a German U-boat sinks his ship, Bowen Tyler ends up in the Atlantic with his Airedale, Nobs, and soon he is helping to capture the very submarine that attacked him. His family's yard built it. Now Bowen, a rescued young woman named Lys La Rue, a handful…
Someone, or something, is giving the whole world nightmares. In a gentle utopia of skylon cities and flying togs, Thorn and his friend Clawly have charted a steady rise in bad dreams and believe it points to a danger the World Executive Committee refuses to t…
A dying thief's last wish puts a stolen talisman in Eric John Stark's hands, and every clan in the Martian Norlands wants it. Camar took the crystal lens from Kushat, the city that guards the pass called the Gates of Death, and he dies in the snow before he c…
On its very first run, Abner Perry's iron mole bores five hundred miles straight down and breaks through into Pellucidar, a hidden world inside the Earth where the sun never moves. Time hardly seems to pass there. David Innes and Perry climb out among cave me…
Conger's new job is to kill a man who has been dead for two hundred years. A hunter and smuggler with six years left in prison, he is offered his freedom by the Speaker of the Council if he will ride a time cage back to 1960 and shoot the obscure Founder of t…
The claws were built to win the war, and they may have done it too well. Six years after the bombs, Earth's surface is ash, and the battlefield belongs to self-repairing killing machines that burrow in the rubble and hunt anything warm that isn't wearing a ra…
Solomon Kane is sick of the jungle, but before he leaves, his blood-brother N'Longa, voodoo man of the Slave Coast, presses a carved staff of black wood into his hands. Kane carries it toward a chain of bare, silent hills where vultures gather and something k…
