Good Intentions
Before she met Hadrian, Valka Onderra Vhad Edda traveled the galaxy, digging through alien ruins on more than a dozen worlds in her efforts to better understand the Quiet, an ancient civilization of advanced, extinct alien xenobites apparently lost to time. Her journeys have brought her to the planet Sadal Suud, where the great clay Giants suffer beneath the whips of mankind. Unable to bear such injustice, Valka must choose not only to act, but to suffer the consequences of action, whatever they may be.
The Night Captain
Commander Halford is the so-called night captain aboard the ISV Tamerlane, the officer in charge of the ship while her primary crew sleeps in cryogenic fugue. But when his ship is attacked at a routine refueling stop off the planet Nagapur, the green officer must rise to the occasion and save his crew. Fortunately for him, he’s not the only person still awake aboard the sleeping vessel. Fortunately for him, he has help in the form of a certain palatine lord, one Hadrian Marlowe himself.
Victim of Changes
To mingle the sacred flesh with machines is an abomination. This every citizen of the Empire knows. It is the mission of the Holy Terran Chantry to safeguard mankind from such perversions, and to visit justice and mercy both upon those who transgress its holy law. For so great a sin, there can be no trial. This is only a sentencing hearing.
Kill the King
The Extrasolarian warlord Calen Harendotes has been amassing an army on the borders of the Sollan Empire for centuries, gathering refugees displaced by the Cielcin to himself. The hermit Monarch’s motives are wholly unknown, but his presence can no longer be tolerated. To this end, the Emperor has dispatched one lonely assassin to deal with the petty upstart once and for all. Unfortunately for him, not all is as it seems on distant Latarra, and there’s far more to Calen Harendotes than meets the eye . . . .
The Demons of Arae
This story appears to be a fragment from a lost volume of Hadrian Marlowe’s autobiography, set between Howling Dark and Demon in White. Ordered to track down a lost legion, Hadrian’s mission has brought him to the airless world of Arae, where a mountain fortress hints at a new terror in the war against the Cielcin, and for the first time pits the Halfmortal against the black mages of MINOS.
The Parliament of Owls
Thousands of years before Hadrian Marlowe, humanity began settling the Norman Expanse, a vast, dense area of space near the heart of the galaxy, at the base of the Arm of Norma. A veteran of the Imperial Legions turned bounty hunter for the Wong-Hopper Consortium, Kalas has been tasked to retrieve some stolen terraforming equipment and retire the thieves that stole it. But Kalas’s mission will bring him face-to-face with the posthuman monsters that dwell between the stars.
Not Made for Us
Carax of Aramis is a humble soldier in the Sollan Imperial Legions, hundreds of years and thousands of light-years removed from his home. Awakened from cryogenic fugue without warning or brief, he is thrust into battle against the Cielcin, an alien menace he did not even know existed. Unprepared for this strange new universe, with only his squad mates by his side, Carax must might for survival in the face of this new and terrible enemy.