Search Worlds Without End

NASA discovered the alien ship lurking in the asteroid belt in the 1960s. They kept the Target under intense surveillance for decades, letting the public believe they were exploring the solar system, while they worked feverishly to refine the technology needed to reach it.

The ship itself remained silent, drifting.

Dr. Jane Holloway is content documenting nearly-extinct languages and had never contemplated becoming an astronaut. But when NASA recruits her to join a team of military scientists for an expedition to the Target, it's an adventure she can't refuse.

The ship isn't vacant, as they presumed.

A disembodied voice rumbles inside Jane's head, "You are home."

Jane fights the growing doubts of her colleagues as she attempts to decipher what the alien wants from her. As the derelict ship devolves into chaos and the crew gets cut off from their escape route, Jane must decide if she can trust the alien's help to survive.

In defiance of NASA, Jane Holloway, the linguist of the Providence expedition, commandeers the alien ship that her crew explored. She sets off to return that ship's marooned navigator to his home world, determined to discover who was behind the genocide that destroyed his original crew.

But when she gets there, she finds his world devastated by the same plague. The remaining members of his race, uniquely gifted at navigating the stars, are stranded across the galaxy. And someone, it seems, doesn't want those lost navigators to be found.

As Jane unravels the mystery of the plague and works to ensure the survival of Ei'Brai's race, she discovers that the life of every sentient being in the galaxy may be in jeopardy... and the clock is ticking.

Abducted. Forced to fight. Darcy has a 10,000 year old secret buried in her genetic code. It makes her a target, but it may also save her.

As a second year medical student, Darcy's life revolves around classes, studying, and her boyfriend Adam -- until she treks through the desert, touches some mysterious stacked stones, and a network of glowing blue lines radiates under her skin.

Then she saw the spaceship. And it was coming for her.

She faces impossibly bad choices and a missing boyfriend.

Darcy struggles to accept her heritage and master her newfound powers as she navigates deception, betrayal, and mortal danger in order to prevail in the galaxy's most dangerous game -- and survive to save Adam.

Earth's days are numbered.

Two very different women race to prepare for the battle to come. The future of Earth is in their hands.

One struggles to resurrect her ruined ship so she can navigate the politics at the galactic core in a desperate bid to recruit allies.

The other strives to master alien technology to supply the forces of Earth with the tools needed to defend themselves against the ravenous Swarm.

Between them, Jane and Zara offer humanity its best chance at survival, but the odds are stacked against them and their best may not be good enough.

Five years have passed since Darcy Eberhardt left Raub for dead on Ulream.

Darcy and her ragtag multispecies crew have used those years well, searching for her lost love, Adam, throughout the disreputable fringes of galactic society -- though the odds are stacked against them. Along the way, they liberate the vulnerable and accumulate allies, some of them dubious. Meanwhile, Darcy continues to master her newfound powers in secret.

A cryptic message raises a ghost from the past to haunt her, forcing her to a crossroads that could lead to a reunion with Adam, or keep him forever beyond her reach.

From the national bestselling author of Alliance, linesman Ean Lambert finds himself caught in a dangerous fight for political power...

The lines. Mysterious yet familiar: the key to controlling every ship in the galaxy. Once they were thought of as tools, but since linesman Ean Lambert discovered strange new lines in an alien vessel, they have become so much more--symbols of a power too great to ignore.

While the Crown Princess of Lancia seeks to share the new technology, her father, the Emperor, has other plans. His latest political maneuverings seem to be tilting the balance of control to Lancia's favor--a move that not all members of the New Alliance are looking upon favorably.

As tensions mount, Ean and his former shipmates must unite to avert a disastrous conflict: the princess working within the tumultuous Alliance, Ean seeking the help of the impatient alien ships, and Ean's close friend and bodyguard, Radko, embarking on a mysterious and perilous mission.

But the biggest threat comes from an unexpected source. Someone is trying to take down the New Alliance from within--and will use anything, even the lines themselves, to ensure its destruction...

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology New Legends (1995), edited by Greg Bear and Martin H. Greenberg, and was reprinted on infinity plus, Februari 2000. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future (2000), also edited by Dozois, and The Space Opera Renaissance (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer. The story is included in the collections The Invisible Country (1996) and A Very British History (2013).

Read the full story for free at Infinity Plus.

An Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winner for his novel Fairyland, Paul J. McAuley designs and fabricates remarkably intricate worlds. He builds some out of solid bricks of science, some from granite carved from the rich quarry of human history and experience. All are marvelous constructs of invention and thought; enthralling landscapes to wander, explore and lose oneself in.

He offers now a world that stands distinctly apart: a place of savagery, secrets and war; the home of ten thousand extraordinary bloodlines ruled by universal devotion to absent gods; a realm of merchants, mercenaries, ghouls, heretics, bureaucrats and feral machines; a world called Confluence.

Child Of The River is the first book of the end times; the beginning chapter in the final great epic of a mysterious civilization. In it, a singular young man named Yama makes his way from a ghostly city of the dead to a metropolis of living wonders, and through the labyrinthine country of Confluence.

On an artificial world created and seeded with ten thousand bloodlines by the long-vanished Preservers, young Yama's ancestry is unique, for he appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshipped architects of Confluence. And on a day near the end of the world, Yama must finally acknowledge the power he neither anticipated nor desires. In the dust of many crumbling bureaucracies, Yama searches for an identity and a history - awed and fearful of his ever-growing capacity to awaken the terrible machines of destruction that his world's absent gods left slumbering.

To the common folk - the unshaped and aboriginal - he is the fulfillment of age-old prophecies. To the functionaries of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, he is a weapon to be molded and used in the bloody civil war raging at the planet's midpoint - a seemingly endless battle that pits those who revere the Preservers' laws against the dangerous Heretics who would obliterate all antiquated values and codes of conduct. But there are still others who have taken notice of Yama as he pursues the hidden secrets of his past. Intelligent powers older than the Builders - as old, perhaps, as the Preservers themselves - are pursuing Yama in turn. And they will stop at nothing to control his present-and, as a result, the future of everything that lives-in anticipation of the ultimate triumph of the Ancients of Days.

Who would lay time to rest, or raise it up from its tomb?

The Ancients of Days -- humans returned from a long exile in the depths of time and space and history -- brought heresy and doubt to the artificial world of Confluence, and ignited a terrible civil war, of all the varied creatures of Confluence's ten thousand genetically manipulated bloodlines, only young Yama holds the power to end the conflict, for who ever controls him controls the myriad machines of the world. Though now a helpless captive being forged into a weapon of horrific consequence, Yama must win the struggle to reclaim his soul, and complete his search for the true story of his origin -- a story mapped eons before his birth.