Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Space Exploration

After a long and bloody battle, legendary Hell Diver Xavier Rodriguez reigns as the dutiful but reluctant new king of the islands. Advised by a council of former sky citizens as well as Cazadores, he works to assimilate the two societies peacefully. But not all Cazadores have accepted the new order. While X tries to ease tensions at home, a rookie team of divers, led by Michael Everhart, returns to the skies in Discovery, formerly the ITC Deliverance. Their mission: To locate other human survivors throughout the world and rescue them.

Neither cosmic philosopher Lars Soren, hotshot pilot Bianca Petrescu, nor the high priestess Jessica McHugh—Lady Death herself—can say quite where in the galaxy they are. But after an experiment gone horribly wrong, one thing is clear: Asphodel Station isn’t in orbit around Jupiter any longer. Worse, the monsters that live out here—ancient eldritch beings thought only to exist in stories and nightmares—have now been alerted to Earth’s existence.

In NecroTek, the space station Asphodel was accidentally teleported to the far side of the galaxy, where they became embroiled in a never-ending war against ancient cosmic horrors. But there is much more to the story … On Earth, scientists uncover an alien spacecraft buried for millions of years beneath Antarctic ice. Inside are terrible secrets and a creature desperate to escape. Soon the scientists studying the Artifact begin to have terrifying dreams, driving many of them to madness and acts of shocking violence.

Before you knew him as the king or the Immortal, he was Commander Xavier “X” Rodriguez—with ninety-six dives under his belt, the most experienced Hell Diver on the airship known as the Hive. Time after time, he dived through the electrical storms, returning with parts to keep his home in the sky. Then, on a jump into Hades, the most hostile environment in North America, he sacrificed everything for mission and team. They returned to the airship with the fuel cells needed to keep the Hive running, but X was left behind.

Months after Inara leaves Serenity, Mal and the crew finally learn the reason for her sudden departure: She is dying of a terminal illness. Expert Esau Weng is said to have developed a means to treat Inara’s condition, but he has been disgraced and incarcerated for life on a notorious Alliance prison planet. On Atata planet, inmates are abandoned with no guards and left to survive as best they can. What’s more, terraforming the planet did not take properly, so the world is a frozen wasteland. To save Inara, the Serenity crew must infiltrate the prison....

On a privately financed orbital habitat above the planet Uranus, political idealism conflicts with pragmatic - and illegal - methods of financing. Add a scientist who has funding to launch a probe deep into Uranus‘ ocean depths to search for signs of life, and you have a three-way struggle for control. Humans can’t live on the gas giants, making instead a life in orbit. Kyle Umber, a religious idealist, has built Haven, a sanctuary above the distant planet Uranus.

In the darkest part of the solar system lies a wormhole. Nether. Astrophysicist Cammie Skoura has joined the first research team traveling to the Nether anomaly, eager to understand the mechanics of the wormhole and to explore its possibilities as a shortcut to Alpha Centauri. But another race of ancient beings has already been here—an impossibly long time ago—leaving remnants of their vast complexes and gigantic temples built for horrific beings beyond comprehension.

It started the night Geena and Henry broke up. What was that strange light in the sky? A new star? A comet? Neither. It was the death of Venus. As if to commemorate the end of NASA’s golden couple, our neighbor planet exploded into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering the Earth with radiation and bizarre particles as big as bacteria - a 10-dimensional superstring nanovirus that literally eats rock, transforming it into liquid, and then into molecule-size black holes that devour the very fabric of space-time.

On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university―and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems. Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake.

Major Larry Randall has been called to Pluto to retrieve Dr. Aaron Mikelson. Mikelson, no longer human after a horrific accident, is now melded to an AI. His enhanced senses have detected an alien artifact on Pluto’s surface, and he’s not leaving without it. Transferred to the research vessel studying Pluto, Randall and the other scientists are stumped as to the artifact’s purpose and origin. Looking for similar signs of aliens they make their way to Pluto’s moon, Charon, where, buried deep under its icy surface, something stirs―and wakes.

In the far reaches of the solar system, the outer planets - billions of miles from Earth, unknown for millennia - are being settled. Neptune, the ice giant, is swathed in clouds of hydrogen, helium, and methane and circled by rings of rock and dust. Three years ago, Ilona Magyr’s father, Miklos, disappeared while exploring the seas of Neptune. Everyone believes he is dead - crushed, frozen, or boiled alive in Neptune’s turbulent seas.

Over thousands of years and thousands of worlds, universe-spanning societies of interdimensional travelers have arisen. Some seek to make the multiverse a better place, some seek power and glory, others knowledge, while still others simply want to write their own tale across the cosmos.

If life were fair, ace pilot Jose Carriles should have ended up a desk jockey like his former friend Corin Timony, back on the lunar colony of New Destiny. Instead, he’s the pilot of the Mosaic—a massive ship taking the Interstellar Union’s first-ever mission to outside our solar system. Timony should have been the best spy at the Bazaar, the lunar colony’s international intelligence arm. Instead, she’s been demoted to admin duties like monitoring long-range communications. She has no one to blame but herself—and maybe Carriles.

Avalon was thriving. The cold sleep colonists from Earth had settled on a verdant, livable world. The fast and cunning predators humans named “grendels” were under control, and the mainland outposts well established. Avalon’s new mainland hydroelectric power station was nearly complete, and when on-line would compensate for the nuclear power systems lost in the Grendel Wars. Humans would have power, and with power came the ability to make all the necessities for life. They would survive. They would not survive as a spacefaring people.

Titan is practically a planet in its own right, with a diameter similar to that of Mercury, methane rainstorms, organic soot, and ethane seas. The views from Titan’s Mayda outpost are spectacular, but all is not well at the moon’s remote science base. On the shore of a methane sea beneath glowering skies, atmospherics researcher Abigail Marco finds herself in the middle of murder, piracy, and colleagues who seem to be seeing sea monsters and dead people from the past.

Special Forces are accustomed to crazy ops, but orbiting a black hole to slow down time and fight Earth’s dirty wars in the future? That’s new, even for them. But that’s the mission for Owen Quarry, Anaya Pretorius, and the rest of COG, a company of elite, disgraced, soldiers from around the globe. They join a defrocked company commander, an AI warship with self-confidence issues, and a crew of misfit troopers on a dizzying time-quest: prove the concept of stationing armies in space-time. If they complete ten missions, they’ll be redeemed as citizens in good standing.

Three years after her best friend Peggy went missing, Harper Starling is lost. Lost in her dead-end job, lost in her grief. All she has are regrets and reruns of her favorite science fiction show, Infinite Odyssey. Then Peggy returns and demands to be taken to the Argonaut, the fictional main character of Infinite Odyssey. But the Argonaut is just that … fictional. Until the TV hero himself appears and spirits Harper away from her former best friend. Traveling through time, he explains that Peggy used to travel with him but is now under the thrall of an alien enemy known as the Incarnate.

The crew and inhabitants of the space-station Asphodel have survived being teleported to the far reaches of the galaxy, and months of fighting against creatures of nightmare and legend. From the brave Lost Souls pilots to the resurrected NecroTeks to the famous and feral Jokers to the courageous scientists and philosophers, all are determined to save themselves … and humanity.

In the aftermath of an asteroid impact, Earth’s power grid is damaged nearly beyond recovery. The survival of our world may well depend on energy sources collected from an abandoned undersea settlement beneath the icy surface of Enceladus. Earth-raised Colonel Carter Rhodes, in charge of Earth’s recovery efforts, calls upon Gwen Baré, a Venusian engineer, to regain control of the deserted moon outpost and collect fuel for Earth’s collapsing power grids.

Everyone wants the Star of Erebus. Space-pirate Nyx Marcus is no exception. With it, she can prove to her father that she is worthy of his legacy. But she’s come up empty-handed aboard the space-ship Thanatos and now Malcam, her father’s first officer, is mutinying. As Nyx flees with a loyal skeleton crew, she discovers that the planet-killing weapon, named after one of the seven gods, is more than what it seems. Erebus isn’t a simple weapon. It’s an ancient AI and a technological god.