Showing results by publisher "Skyboat Media" in All Categories

When John Bandicut sets out across the surface of Triton, he's hardly ready for the storm of chaos that's about to blow through his life. The alien Quarx that soon inhabits his mind is humanity's first contact with an alien life. The Quarx, part of an ancient galactic civilization that manipulates chaos theory to predict catastrophic events, seeks to prevent a cometary collision that could destroy the Earth. But it must have help. If Bandicut chooses to trust the Quarx, he must break all the rules - indeed, sacrifice his own life.

Anna's success as the Eastar NIA station chief has catapulted her into the position of Director of NIA Stations. Anna is uncomfortable with the promotion and bored. She has a master chief secretary, a lieutenant aide-de-camp, and 15 commanders and their staff to do the work. But she suspects not all of her commanders are happy with their new, very young admiral or are doing their jobs. But she has no way to observe those commanders as their stations reside on distant systems.

Matt Helm has got a good thing going with Elly. So an outfit of terrorists really have picked the wrong woman when they kidnap her in order to leverage Matt into carrying out an assassination. Now, Helm finds himself in Costa Verde with one thing on his mind: revenge…

For a hundred years, Delbin has lived on Earth, voluntarily cut off from his birth land, Moranaia. He's learned to hide his elven nature and use his mind magic without getting noticed - until he accidentally wields it on the Moranaian scout sent to check on him.

During Fiesta, three desperate men converge in a perilous New Mexico town. It takes four days for Sailor to travel to New Mexico by bus. He arrives broke, sweaty, and ready to get what's his. It's the annual Fiesta, and the locals burn an effigy of Zozobra so that their troubles follow the mythical character into the fire. But for former senator Willis Douglass, trouble is just beginning.

Basic training is over. For 11-year-old Robbi, the real work on the Laddertop station begins…even as its strange, dark secrets grow more compelling. With the help of mentally linked robot companions, she and an elite crew of children perform the dangerous maintenance work on the Power Web. But only Robbi keeps having urgent dreams from The Givers, the alien species who bestowed upon humans all the Laddertop technology.

Prescient and scientifically accurate, Heart of the Comet is known as one of the great hard SF novels of the 1980s. First published in 1986, it tells the story of an ambitious manned mission to visit Halley's Comet, alter its orbit, and mine it for resources. But all too soon, native cells - that might once have brought life to Earth - begin colonizing the colonists. As factions battle over the comet's future - and that of Earth - only love, courage, and ingenuity can avert disaster and spark a new human destiny.

Civilization has an off switch. The Russians call it Lunnaya Pesnya. Moon Song. They bring the device aboard the International Space Station disguised as an experimental electromagnetic propulsion system. Just a harmless EmDrive prototype, ferried into space for testing in microgravity. But the device is not what it appears to be, and it’s far from harmless. When military cosmonauts hijack the ISS, Russia’s plans of global conquest are revealed. Moon Song is a game-changing electromagnetic pulse weapon, capable of attacking any location on Earth from orbit.

The onetime world-class thief Nolan - now happily gone straight with his own restaurant/nightclub - whisks his longtime lover Sherry off to Vegas for a trip to a wedding chapel and a honeymoon stay. But an eye-in-the-sky security cam at a casino spots Nolan, whose past catches up with him when he’s thought to be casing the joint. An old “friend” sees Nolan as the perfect patsy for a scheme to heist the weekly skim haul....

This collection shows a vibrant young writer with a wide-ranging imagination, ferocious creative energy, devastating wit, and an eye for the wonderful and terrifying and tragic. Among the gems are "All the Sounds of Fear", "The Sky Is Burning", "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman", and "In Lonely Lands". Though they stand tall on their own merits, they also point the way to the sublime stories that followed soon after and continue to come even now, more than 50 years later.

People are vanishing without a trace. And the disappearances are getting closer to home—the next likely target is Mac, Matt Helm’s shrewd old boss. To get to the bottom of the mystery, Helm follows two beguiling and treacherous women, who lead him all the way to his ancestral home—Scandinavia. With a coup from within the agency, and a terrorist threat from without, it’s clear that nobody can be trusted.

A year after having been reactivated as a spy, Matt Helm receives a message from his ex-wife asking for his aid. The threat is an enemy agent named Martel, disguised as a mob hit man. To protect his family, Helm must remove the threat before his own children pay the ultimate price. Originally released in the era of the James Bond novels, the Matt Helm novels were considered grittier and more realistic than Bond, garnering them critical praise and ardent fans.

At a funeral of an old friend, Matt Helm takes a trip down memory lane and sparks a romance that he thought was safely locked in the past. But with old feelings resurfacing, other things Helm thought were buried are coming back to haunt him - a small-time hood in Mexico, a dirty drug deal, and a string of women that lead him into dangerous territory.

Can a priest, his brother, and the brother's girlfriend solve a murder case and see justice done - or will they be the murderer's latest victim? A Murder on Wall Street takes us inside the world of Captain O'Brian's Irish Pub and Cigar Bar in Manhattan, a legendary hotspot in the Financial District. Investigating the death are pub owners Joey Mancuso, fired from the New York Police Department for his unorthodox methods, and his brother Father Dominic, who isn't your typical priest.

Matt Helm is puzzled. He’s been sent to Mexico to investigate the sighting of a flying saucer, but Helm doesn’t believe in little green men. Then his Russian opposite number is shot in her hotel, but who did it? And why are the Mexican cops acting so tough? Time to track down the redhead who called in the sighting and get to the bottom of the case.

Far out in the Pacific, among the sunny islands of Hawaii, a dark, venomous plot is engineered by a rogue agent, an angel-faced man called the Monk, who has a special fondness for high explosives. His target is an American troopship with 3,000 US soldiers scheduled to blow sky high - unless Matt Helm can stop him. But first Helm has to trust the beautiful stranger who claims to be his sister-in-law and insists that his former "wife" had just willed him half a million dollars.

It was not a peaceful way to die, but there was nothing Matt Helm could do for his fellow agent. He had found him in a Canadian motel room - his once-handsome face eaten away, corroded by acid. Scratch one agent. The women wouldn't be lining up for him now. But it created further problems. The most likely culprit was a woman Helm had orders to protect - no matter what the cost.

An agent like Helm might be a nice man to live with for a while, but he's not the kind of guy a woman would marry - unless she has to in order to maintain an ingenious cover. The man whose daily bread is violence takes a most unlikely bride - just to ensure death doesn't part them.

A quiet mission of assassination is no sweat for legendary agent Matt Helm - until a shapely foreign agent he never got around to finishing off lures him into a strange trek in the wilds of Northern Mexico. And when a Russian missile is smuggled out of Cuba, it falls into the hands of a political fanatic much too close to home.

Untouched by Human Hands consists of 13 stories of beings who dwell on the strange borders of reality. Some of these stories tell of people you know or of events that might happen - but haven't yet. Some will take you to the furthermost reaches of the sky and to planets whose names are unknown this side of Arcturus. And some - perhaps the richest and most memorable of these stories - open into the interior of strange minds to reveal the reflection of ourselves.