THE END OF YOUR WORLD? These twelve tales from critically-acclaimed author Michael Warren Lucas remind us that doom is always personal. Genes gone wild, or not wild enough. Cosmic heroes demanding you show them to a bank robbery, or else. Learning after a lifetime that your love is named chocolate, and chasing it no matter the cost. Discovering that your cozy desk job might get you killed, that...
The modern year of 1927, and orcs still have to fight elven asshole bullshit. Prohibition left exceptions for the church of Men, the Elvish sacraments, even the Dwarfish rituals. But the elves in Congress insist that orcs have no sacraments. Without the Orcish draught, without the rites, Uruk-Tai's fine strong boys might grow tall. They might earn respect. But they will never be Orcs. And Uruk...
A FAMILY AFFRAY With her father's death, mercenary thief Beaks returns to the place she hates most—her childhood home, to both pay her respects and make certain he's gone. She finds only lies. Determined to rip the truth out of the shadows, Beaks ricochets around the world, defying killers and government agents alike. With the man she loves and the secretive hacker Sister Silence, she targets a...
Not your normal Friday night in the computer room. Not a normal night anywhere. Terry is the archetypal old-school Unix admin, nurturing servers with care and precision while avoiding the latest trendy garbage. KDE and Gnome on a server? Nope, if you need a GUI use FVWM. The latest trend Terry refuses? One adopted almost everywhere? Systemd, the replacement init. So Systemd comes for Terry...
Meet the new universe, same as the old universe— but thirteen billion years younger. Aidan Redding's new assignment? A space station in a universe so young it's barely invented hydrogen. Researchers study the cosmos' earliest days, discover whole new realms of science... and go screaming insane. The mathematicians claim this universe obeys the same natural laws as Redding's own. At the...
A "Beaks" spin-off! Liza Bradley knows the proper mercies for her career. A painless bullet through the head. An instantly broken neck. Don't want either? Drop your gun and run away. Quickly. Ex-Marine Matt Harrison? Green as lettuce and half as tough. But as Liza's team strikes their target in earthquake-ravaged Ecuador, Harrison strikes Liza in the only way she doesn't know how to fight...
One Orcess Against The World Mha fought in the Spanish-American War and earned all the respect an orcess could dream of. But not even a life of constant struggle prepared her to endure her final days in a rural Michigan barn, so age-decrepit she can't even pick up a cow. Her husband's death abandons her to face that end alone. Mha holds one thing beneath even solitude and weakness: dealing with...
"If Agatha Christie ran Unix Conventions" The BSD North conference draws some of the smartest people in the world. These few days will validate Dale Whitehead's work—or expose him as a fraud. When a tragic death devastates the conference, only Dale suspects murder. Computer geeks care about code. But do they care enough… to kill?
50% John McClane 50% Robin Hood 100% trouble Reeling from the death of her lover and partner, freelance "exfiltration specialist" Billie Carrie Salton breaks into a high-tech, high-security biotechnology firm to steal their sickle cell anemia cure and broadcast it to the world. In, out, announce. Easy. Except Salton's life never works that smoothly. And a gig gone wrong only begins the disasters.
Physics inconvenient? Change it. Then watch it try to kill you. Solve a murder in a universe without ground to stand on. Investigate inexplicable deaths a few million years after the Big Bang. Take too many breaths and never go home again. Let the antimatter trickle between your fingers, and visit five alien universes in this first Montague Portal omnibus. Contains: Forever Falls Hydrogen...
Trapped on a reef with a walking dead man. A need that cannot be sated or survived. Nobody else hears the dead dog's murderous ghost. Whiskey means silence. So do claws. Mental scars drag the world behind them. SOME SALVATIONS COST TOO MUCH. "The five stories in this collection are a real treat for fans of fantasy and horror. Join writer Michael Warren Lucas as he takes you on a trip through...
Duplicate. Infiltrate. Exterminate. Liberate? The alien ate its way out of Antarctica, devouring and duplicating every living thing it found. Humanity turned continents to glass and oceans to poison in a desperate effort to stop it—and failed. Nobody expected that once the alien copied everyone, once it owned the world, it would set the copies free. Police detective Kevin Holtzmann fled with...
SECOND CONTACT Aidan Redding's entire goal for her time in this universe: behave. For once. Discovering seafaring aliens trashes that plan. The aliens raise questions. Her co-workers raise more. The answers explain it all. And ruin everything. On a world where gravity changes every second, Redding finds herself involuntarily allied with a mathematician from Soviet Texas as she races to save not...
A hundred-foot barren rock in the middle of the ocean. A plane wreck. One survivor. One dead man. But the dead man keeps moving. Stop moving? He’ll eat you. Sleep too long? He’ll eat you. The only thing tougher than living with a zombie? Surviving without one.