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2010-10-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

An aimless young man with a broken heart...
Four child prodigies with an earthshaking idea...

A beautiful musician who is considerably more than she seems...

and an unearthly force capable of ripping people right out of this world come together in the swirl of magic and science that is WINTER OF THE WILD HUNT.

Sharing a home with four super geniuses isn’t easy, especially if you’re worried the machine they’re building in the attic might just destroy the planet.

When a beautiful singer with a voice that’s literally out of this world smashes into your life like a freight train all hope of normalcy goes right out the window.

Suddenly you’re changing for her. Not only your mind but your body- changing into something new, something inhuman.

You find yourself at the center of a centuries’ old battle between all of mankind and mystical forces too powerful and malevolent to contemplate.

When you realize the fate of two worlds rests on which side of the conflict you choose you know whatever you decide could spell oblivion for billions including your best friends and the woman you’ve come to love.

WINTER OF THE WILD HUNT is a tale of magic, science, friendship and a love so terrible it just might break the world.

2010-05-31T13:25:00.000-07:00

HURRY! HURRY! HURRY!

ESHU... A lonely god at the end of the universe? Sounds like a party.

DR. EIDLING... A scientist with a physics problem that just might be murder.

ANTIOPE... A young girl with a secret bundle, monsters in the dark woods? Not your grandmother's fairy tale.

Geoffrey Thorne, author of Star Trek: Titan: Sword of Damocles, assembles these tales and many more under one tent for the first time.

Bring your friends! Bring your lovers! Bring your cats! There's something in the Dreamnasium for everybody!

Excerpted from THE DAME WORE A TESSERACT

Gray didn’t like guns. They were heavy, oily, clunky things that too often put holes in people he cared about.

He wasn’t sure he actually cared about the red-draped dame currently clutching his arm in terror but he was dead sure he didn’t want anybody airing her out before he found out what her deal was.

“I think someone’s trying to kill me,” she’d said in that hot breathy thing she called a voice. Then she’d turned her head to hide a tear while at the same time affording him a view of her ample cleavage that would have made a seeing-eye dog walk through a plate glass window.

Gray just smiled.

She looked like a high-end little number, the talk of the society pages, but there was some grit under those cherry colored nails if Harris Gray was any judge. And she was familiar too, now that he thought of it. It was like they had some kind of history together that he couldn’t remember.

She was good, whoever she was, that was the point. Even though there was obviously more going on with her than she wanted to spill, Gray had the feeling that getting to the heart of her matter would dig up the goods on his own situation.

That situation got a little less murky with each passing second. He was from someplace else. Another country? Another city? He wasn’t sure yet but it wasn’t here. As familiar as these environs were, he could feel in his bones that they weren’t exactly his.

He was a cop or something in that other place. He had a partner, a woman, he thought, who went from place to place with him setting right what somebody had put wrong. There was definitely more to it but that was the gist.

“Well,” he said in the kind of low rumble that made girls knees weak and guys make way. “We can’t have that, can we?”

He was just about to get down to brass tacks with her when the gunsels and, more importantly, the widow-makers they toted, came pounding up the stairs to his office.

“Let’s get you out of here,” he told the Dame as the two silhouettes appeared in the smoky glass window of his office door.

In the second it took him to grab her and his trench coat, he realized she’d never make it down the fire escape in stilettos that high. The only other option was the closet.

She let out a little squeak as he whipped the door open and shoved her in with the dusty moose bust and the golf clubs he never used.

“Quiet,” he hissed as he shut her in. “Let me handle this.”

He shut off her protest with the click of the door just as two of the biggest gorillas he’d ever seen kicked their way into his digs. The gats looked like toys in their big meaty hands but Gray knew they meant business.

“You Gray?” said the one who looked more like an orangutan than a gorilla.

“Who wants to know,” said Gray, making a show of hanging his trench back on the ancient coat rack.

Suddenly there was a ring of cold steel pressed hard into his throat– the nozzle of a very competently made Tommie gun. Gray froze, letting the trench flap in his hand.

“Crack wise with us, flatfoot, you’ll be whistling out the side of your neck,” said the one that looked more like a gorilla. “Get it?”

“Got it,” said Gray.

“Good.” The gat receded slightly but the apes closed in.

“We got a message for you, Gray,” said the first one.

“Something simple, I bet,” said Gray. Ape Number Two cracked him across the jaw hard enough to let him know that a break was in his future if he kept up the smart guy act.

“The Boss wants to see you,” said Ape Number One.

“And the Boss is...?”

“Maxie Sparks,” said the ape.

“Never heard of him,” said Gray. It was a lie. He knew the name and felt he should know more, considering the little chill it sent through him. He just couldn’t match the handle with a face or a rep. Not yet.

“Yeah, well, he’s heard of you,” said Ape Number Two. “He wants to see you.”

“Guess I want to be seen then, don’t I?”

“Believe it, smart guy,” said Ape Number One. “Two o’clock at the Chateau Noir. You know it?”

“I read the papers,” said Gray.

The Noir was a gin mill masquerading as a short order restaurant just on the edge of the city’s bowery. It was the kind of place the lowlifes went to get a taste of the highlife and the society set stepped down to get some mud on their spats. It was also the sort of joint where you could catch a bullet if you didn’t stay sharp.

“Don’t be late,” said Ape Number One, moving out of the little office.

“Yeah,” said his partner, following. “’Cause if you’re late, you will be late. Like, The Late Halo Gray.”

“That’s Harris,” said Gray, irritated, but he wasn’t quick enough. The gorillas were already halfway down the stairs, well out of earshot.

“Guess you don’t have time for me anymore,” said a voice that made Gray think of purring cats.

He turned to find the dame peeling herself out of his closet and, it seemed to him, nearly out of the too-tight skirt she wore.

The hem was caught on the rusty hinge of the closet door, dragging it a little down and exposing just a hint of the porcelain flesh beneath.

Red garters, thought Gray. Nice.

“Nix,” he said aloud, deftly flicking the hem free of its entanglement. “For a doll like you, I always make time.”

2010-02-14T11:43:00.001-08:00

FULL-THROTTLE SPACE TALES: SPACE GRUNTS... stories of soldiers on the front lines, coming home, fighting, dying, winning, losing and and, ultimately winning, even when they lose. More than anything they are a hell of a lot of fun.

Excerpted from TRUTH METRIC

[MEMORIAL CAPSULE: HYPERCAST: CHAN, TSAO: CAPT. CGS APEX]

Dear Elliot,

Please forgive my familiarity. Your core life metric indicated you prefer not to be addressed by title and I am attempting to respect your wishes. I remember you when we put out from the Bridge Station on Ganymede. You and your spouse seemed so proud seeing your own child among the Apex’s inaugural crew. In fact I shared your feeling.

Apex is a new ship, one of the new Sabre class that CoreGov Tactical believes will turn the tide of the war.

It is a terrible thing to have to inform a parent of the death of their child. It is a terrible thing to hold oneself responsible for that death. There are no words, not in any human language nor in any of the alien ones to which I’ve been exposed, that can ever encompass or adequately describe the awful grief that follows such a tragedy.

I won’t presume to tell you the things you must certainly already know about your child. No stranger can reveal much to a parent that they didn’t nurture or battle themselves over the years. You were there at the beginning and through all of the firsts and seconds and thirds. All we see is the end product of your hard and, in this case, exceptional work.

[HYPERCAST TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTION//REACQUIRE//]

“Jesu!” said SM Boylan just as the hull burst ahead of her. She had only a microsecond to vault backwards over the lip of the access hatch, away from the blast. Just in time. Even as the shards of flying metal shredded Nelson and Kim to chunks of flesh and a thick crimson fog, the plexi seal came down at either hatch point, sealing the ruptured area off.

Safe. She was safe. For the moment.

There was hard vacuum rushing in there now, forcing what little atmo that remained to whoosh out into the dark and carrying Kim and Nelson’s confettied remains along. The claxon went off even as she was smacking the comm node to signal the bridge of her status.

“C and C,” she barked over the siren’s wail, “This is SM Boylan. Apex has been breached. Two span of deck fourteen, hullward, is exposed and gone. Screens at hatch points are locked so the bubble is secure. Waiting for sealant. Affirm.”

“Affirmed,” said the voice stretched to nearly robotic thinness by its trip trough the grid. “Casualties?”

“Adjunct Kim and Spaceman Nelson, KIA,” she said, natural adrenaline having pounded her emotions flat for the moment.

“SimGrav and spark read active at your position,” said the voice. “Affirm.”

“That’s affirmed, C and C,” she said, taking minor pleasure in the fact that she was not floating around a dark and icy corridor either whole or in bits. “What the hell happened?”

“Unknown at this time,” said the voice. Probably Rogers but she couldn’t be sure. “Are you injured?”

“Negative.”

“Stand for orders,” he said.

“Affirmed.”

Boylan watched as sealant foam flooded the space between the plexi sheets, filling it like a wave of cottage cheese. In ten seconds it would be as hard as the hull and the plexi would retract.

Her hands shook a bit, partly from the close call and partly from the adrenaline the near miss had sent surging through her. They quieted soon enough and her mind started in on her lists.

What happened? Possible attack. Possible collision. Possible defect-inspired structural failure. Protocol? Go hot and get set to repel boarders? Dig in and ride out the passage through this asteroid swarm or whatever it was? Wait for the brass, or figure out what the hell was up on her own? Get hold of Alex before she had to kiss her ass good-bye?

As the sirens continued to scream, Boylan sparked up her BIORB, telling the little implant to tap the nearest AI for current ship status. C & C wouldn’t tell her more than they felt she needed to know but there was often a massive gap between what the brass thought was important and what could save her life.

“Data, data, data,” her dad had always told her. There’s safety in data.” He’d never been proved wrong yet.

Something had punched Apex in the guts, puncturing Boylan’s position as well as sixteen others on the port hull. So far there were only three more losses beyond Nelson and Kim with some injuries being tended on the spots. The brass were up there hanging response scenarios.

Tick, tick, tick, she thought, clocking the seconds. Tell me something. She wasn’t good to anybody just sitting there but, without knowledge of which protocol to run, she couldn’t move either. She hated not being able to do anything. More than that, she wanted something to hit.

When the second volley of whatever-it-was pounded Apex again, this time killing the gravity and slamming her hard into the opposite bulkhead, Boylan found she wanted something to murder.

Her BIORB flooded her brain with casualty reports and system failures so numerous and immediate that she was forced to mute it to spare herself the cascade

“This is C and C,” said Rogers’s voice, now recognizable through the static. “All decks report casualty and damage numbers. Affirm.”

“Hit them back,” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her and wouldn't heed her if he could. The brass kept their own time.

This second impact had killed the grav and set her flying so now she was obliged to flail every limb in hopes of finding purchase on one of the surfaces she slammed into. Finally her fingers caught the lip of the bulkhead seam and she was able to right herself.

She hung there, waiting for her BIORB to tamp down her heart rate and tweak her adrenals.

Then the lights went out.

2010-02-14T11:41:00.001-08:00

A dashing killer trying to outrun his past... A world-weary cop determined to close her most baffling case... A dying heiress desperate to find a cure for her disease...

When these stories collide on the same Martian night the results are not only explosive but deadly.

The author of Star Trek: Titan: Sword of Damocles presents an original novelette of murder and magic set in a future that is both familiar and strange.

2006-09-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

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2006-09-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

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