Search Worlds Without End

Ruth Black is an English novelist left widowed by the mysterious death of her husband during the Great War. She immigrates to Australia and settles in the sleepy coastal town of Pelican River to repair her broken heart and work on her next novel.

But her quiet life is thrown into disarray when Aunt Julia arrives with an urgent, dreadful message. Ruth's life is in danger and the threat is from a source not entirely of this world. With the assistance of her butler Rutherford, and her good friend the inventor Gordon Duncombe, Ruth finds herself caught up in a hair-raising race to defy her impending doom.

Watching HMS Eclipse through the geosynch spaceport window, Officer James Dunne, a newly minted graduate of the Royal Interstellar Service Academy, thinks his first assignment will be routine... an easy going excursion on an aging deep-space cruiser, heading into the Dark, on a mission to explore the farthest reaches of known space.

James had always wanted to be a part of the romantic final frontier. Now, he thought, his lifelong dream was about to come true.

In fact, he was about to begin the greatest challenge, and worst nightmare, of his already-too-short service career!

Although repeatedly warned "not to rock the boat", it soon becomes obvious that it is too late for the young Officer!

He is drafted into the First Contact Team where he realizes two things: (1) that his contribution to the Interstellar Space Service might easily turn out to be that of a 'replaceable warm body' and (2) that disrespecting junior officers, like Dunne himself, often suffer 'unfortunate' and sometimes fatal 'accidents' out in the Dark.

Dunne's survival will depend on his ability to separate power from perversion while enduring the corruption and control of others!

When retired top homicide inspector Zette McGee, late of Winter City, Ganymede, gets called out of her mysterious retirement to help Kell Fallow, a desperate former android accused unjustly of murdering his wife and children, she knows she has to help him, for Zette has a secret she is desperate to keep, and Fallow knows all about it.

With the help of her best friend, the elderly but very suave former secret agent Gideon Smith, and his ridiculously impressive personal starship, the Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Zette sets out (a) to help the accused man, but also (b) to keep Gideon from finding out her own awful secret, even as everything they learn in the investigation keeps pointing to it.

But when Kell Fallow is killed by a bomb he didn't know was buried in his guts, and when a homebrew android identical to Zette destroys her home on the luxurious Serendipity habitat, Gideon and Zette go on the run, only to run afoul of sabotage, spies, nasty infections, and bad guys galore and ordinary machines come to relentless, murderous life.

The case will take Zette and Gideon on a terrifying journey into the darkest reaches of human space, in pursuit of an ancient truth -- and will bring her into deadly contact with that truth's keeper, the awesomely powerful firemind, Hydrogen Steel, an artificial consciousness evolved far beyond its original design, and which is utterly determined to keep that same truth from getting out, at any cost.

A seriously down on her luck unlicensed Stalktown PI named Louise "Lou" Meagher ekes out a sparse living solving petty crimes. She is chronically broke, clinically dead, and nervous about being evacuated from her home planet, Kestrel, which in nine days time will be hit by an unstoppable doomsday rock, known as the Bloody Bastard. But Lou takes on one last case: helping a cybernetically enhanced canine named Dog, locate his former master, a defective biological android boy known only as Kid....

For "Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait" specialist, Aloysius "Spider" Webb, time travel has lost its luster.

Working as a senior time machine repair technician, Spider has seen it all - past, present and future. Wanting more out of life, Spider hates time travel and everything that goes with it - after all, time travel cost him his job as a top investigating police officer.

Fixing time machines is a waste of Spider's talent. But he's resigned to do it until he discovers, inside a broken second-hand time machine, the corpse of a woman; brutally murdered, wrapped in plastic and duct tape. Before Spider can act on his old police instincts, the shadowy Department of Time and Space steps in and seizes the machine, the remains, and all of the evidence, and closes the investigation.

Spider wants answers, but his questions only lead to more questions; unsettling evidence, brewing trouble, and the knowledge that Spider, himself, might be involved in an epic battle at the End of Time. Who can Spider trust? And what will they tell him: the truth or what he wants to hear?

Aloysius "Spider" Webb fixes time machines for a living. He hates his job; he hates his life, and hates time travel even more. He simply wants to get on with his life. He's a hard working Australian bloke -- a good man in a bad situation who is willing to do almost anything to regain his self-respect and the affection of his nearly ex-wife, Molly; a mad sculptress on her way to international fame and fortune.

Spider's life and his world are changing. After quitting the Western Australian Police Service, Spider studied to become a time machine repair mechanic, eking out a sparse living fixing broken down machines. But the repair business isn't what it used to be. Once, time machines were as big as cars; but now they're smaller and compact, portable, and cost too much to get fixed so it's easier for people to simply buy a new one. Times are tough and there is no end in sight.

Meanwhile, Spider's new boss at the Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait franchise needs help: his secretly built, totally illegal, radically overclocked, hotrod time machine has been stolen, and Spider is the right man to get it back before it falls into the wrong hands, or worse inadvertently destroys the entire universe.

Spider's journey begins with a simple favor to help his almost ex-wife, Molly, and moves to the icy wastes of the far, far future.

Surprise and shock are the only constants in Spider's life; why should this job be any different?