Space Exploration

In the year 2115, when the Earth is no longer inhabitable, the remainder of humanity lives in Babel, a giant space station. Two pilots, Quentin and Kai, must find the planet Paradise, where only the most promising citizens are allowed to live. On their journey, Quentin and Kai encounter Quentin’s estranged father, who left Babel for Paradise when Quentin was a child, and they discover just how different Paradise is from what they imagined—and how they must change it for the better.

Damien Montgomery is as much a nobody as a Mage of the star-spanning Protectorate of Mars can be. Trained as a Jump Mage, one of the elite who teleport ships across interstellar space, he lacks the connections to find a ship that will take him. Until pirates and politics strand Captain David White of the jump freighter Blue Jayin his home system. The two men's matching needs birth a choice and a partnership that will take them from high-end orbitals to prisons to alien graveyards in forgotten star systems.

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.

When his older sister, Quedra Sa-Yool, was brought down by her political enemies, ne'er-do-well and pilot extraordinaire Zham followed her into exile. Quedra, a military genius once known as the Diamond Knife, now commands the mercenary airship Last Stop and its motley crew, and Zham leads its tiny air wing—when he's not roistering in bars and dodging moneylenders, that is.

On the heels of discovering interstellar travel, humanity has stumbled upon the first signs of intelligent life in another system. Captain Adrian Kemper is selected to lead the expedition to Kyra-2B in order to make first contact with the Kyrans. He departs a world struggling to deal with overpopulation, knowing that the realities of space travel will mean the Earth he eventually returns to will no longer be home. Even the stone cottage he loves may not remain.