Brand-new stories · 36 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
For years Solomon Kane has followed the trail of Marylin Taferal, an English girl kidnapped as a child and sold to slavers, and now it ends at a black crag in the African jungle. Beyond it lies Negari, an ancient stone city ruled by Nakari, a beautiful and pi…
Someone in the fort has sold out the Stellar Legion, and when the rains come to the Venusian swamps, the Nahali will pour over the earthworks. Ian MacIan, a white-haired Earthman who was once an officer, wants nothing now but to die honorably in the ranks. Yo…
Earth is a backwater now, one planet-wide game farm where rich outworlders come to shoot beasts imported from five dozen worlds. Gilbert, eighteen and already a guide in the swamps of Lewsanna, has led plenty of jaded clients. Mulveen is the worst. After a th…
Twelve ships and thirty-eight hundred exiles from Earth have wandered the seas of Venus for a generation, driven from every shore by fever, swamp and the hostile Cloud People. When a granite cliff rises out of the mist, Matt Harker, bitter and haunted by memo…
For eight years humanity has lived underground while robot 'leadys' fight the war on a radioactive surface no person could survive. Don Taylor, a weapons planner on his first rest period in months, is happy to read about another raid on Moscow over breakfast,…
Tomorrow the legions of Rome march into the heather, and Bran Mak Morn, king of the Picts, may lose his kingdom before it is born. His alliance of Pictish clans, British chariot-fighters and the Gaelic horsemen of Cormac of Connacht depends on three hundred N…
Steve Clarney and Yar Ali are down to their last bullets in a desert sand-pit, with Bedouin riders circling and their water nearly gone, all for the sake of a legend. The American wanderer and his big Afghan comrade have followed rumors from Shiraz to the Per…
Somewhere on Earth lives a telepath who can kill a man, take his face and his place, and fool even his closest friends. He has already shown what happens to people who go looking for him: a hotel blown apart, a city's water poisoned, a liner lost. Arlene Rolf…
