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…