Ten genre-spanning speculative tales of worlds both strange and familiar...On a planet that should have been long abandoned, a salvage operator discovers an impossible ecosystem...On an isolated mining outpost on Mercury, a woman dreams of suicide-and wakes to find other people dead...Alone in a crowded city, a woman seeks the origins of a haunted clock connected to a captivating stranger... Plus seven more stories of aliens, poltergeists, threatening polygons, and carnivorous rabbits, exploring why we need each other-and why sometimes we don't.Includes three adventures set in Bonesteel's acclaimed Central Corps universe.This edition contains the full text of the original 2020 release and adds three new stories, two never before published.

A reluctant hero must prevent war in space and on Earth in this fast-paced military science fiction thriller from the author of The Cold Between and Remnants of Trust—a page-turning hybrid combining the gritty, high-octane thrills of James S. A. Corey and the sociopolitical drama of Ann Leckie.Space is full of the unknown . . . most of it ready to kill you.When hostilities between factions threaten to explode into a shooting war on the moon of Yakutsk, the two major galactic military powers, Central Corps and PSI, send ships to defuse the situation. But when a strange artifact is discovered, events are set in motion that threaten the entire colonized galaxy—including former Central Corps Commander Elena Shaw.Now an engineer on a commercial shipping vessel, Elena finds herself drawn into the conflict when she picks up the artifact on Yakutsk—and investigation of it uncovers ties to the massive, corrupt corporation Ellis Systems, whom she's...