Flying at the helm of a powerful battle cruiser, former pirate Catarina Vargus leads a collection of colonists, miners, engineers, and navy personnel to establish an outpost far beyond the frontier. The Royal Navy needs a forward operating base in their war against the alien race known as Apex, who has vowed to exterminate all sentient life in the quarter. Catarina's expedition soon draws the attention of Scandian marauders, driven from their home worlds by plague and war in search of plunder.

Lieutenant Capp is integrating Royal Navy tech onto a battered ship from the Old Earth fleet when she gets orders to cross the so-called Roach Frontier and investigate a potentially hostile alien race. The insectoids have survived a genocidal war and are expanding aggressively toward human territory. She arrives to find a navy warship already lurking in the system, with Captain McGowan of HMS Peerless preparing a preemptive strike against an insectoid mining colony. 

The humans on the Sentinel Battle Station have waited a decade in silence for their enemy's return - a merciless, bird-like alien species known as Apex, who are bent on exterminating all other sentient life in the quadrant. But when a strange warship appears, the crew is thrown into chaos as one faction is desperate to communicate with the newcomers, and the other will kill to keep their mission a secret. For the crew of HMS Blackbeard, a Royal Navy warship light years from home, the battle station may be their salvation.

Commander Dalton Reeves is a maverick officer with exceptional genetic strength and a dark family history—a history that will come back to haunt him. Punished for exceeding orders one time too many, he’s packed off to the "The Abyss"—the most dangerous space station in the galaxy. But a posting that should have led to five years in obscurity will propel Reeves into the center of an interstellar war against a long-forgotten alien adversary with a bitter grudge. 

Survival in Man’s Second Dark Age...Three hundred years after the fall of society, the last fragments of civilization are clinging to life, living in the ruins of the ancient cities in nearly-medieval conditions. Technology has been reduced to legend, monsters roam the forests, and fear reigns supreme. But that is just the beginning...The wind-borne spores are spreading, disfiguring men and twisting their minds, turning them into creatures that threaten to destroy the townships.