Showing results by publisher "Podium Audio" in Hard Science Fiction

At long last, humanity has moved beyond Earth and begun seeding new worlds. Colonies extend across the solar system, from Luna to Mars to Saturn's satellite Titan. Even Jupiter's moon Europa has become home to a couple thousand brave souls willing to risk their lives adapting to its frozen and deadly landscape.

An alien Entity had waited megaannum, millions of years, for sentience to emerge on a planet with an ecosystem vibrant enough to foster the evolution of complexity. Impervious to impatience, dispassionate, and deliberate, the Entity's patience was rewarded with a promising species—humans. When the time was right, the warning was given: "The tenure of sentience is ephemeral." The Entity had borne witness to the extinction of civilizations and their species, an outcome that must not be repeated. Not this time. Not with a species of such potential.

Piloted by a six-year-old girl, the godlike Skalm guards the Districts of TASC. Her family is long dead. Her adopted father is a synthetic copy of an alien, her nanny an artificial mind connected via subspace to every part of the globe, feeding the young girl information, finding prey to satiate her growing thirst. But the young girl is an innocent, a victim, one of millions the war has already claimed. Her innocence has been sacrificed by a man with singular purpose: a man who will stop at nothing in order to prepare Earth for the coming conflict.

From the Audie-nominated narrator of The Martian. In eleven years' time, a million members of an alien race will arrive at Earth. Years before they enter orbit, their approach will be announced by the flare of a thousand flames in the sky, their ships' huge engines burning hard to slow them from the vast speeds needed to cross interstellar space. These foreboding lights will shine in our night sky like new stars, getting ever brighter until they outshine even the sun, casting ominous shadows and banishing the night until they suddenly blink out.

In the 25th century, humans have conquered space. The advent of faster-than-light travel has opened up hundreds of habitable planets for colonization, and humans have exploited the virtually limitless space and resources for hundreds of years with impunity. So complacent have they become with the overabundance that armed conflict is a thing of the past, and their machines of war are obsolete and decrepit. What would happen if they were suddenly threatened by a terrifying new enemy?

When Jack Harrison climbed down the short ladder from the airlock and stepped onto the debris covered soil, the ground crackled with the sound of dried leaves and twigs.

In the 31st century, humanity stands on the precipice of extinction. The human colonies throughout the galaxy have been decimated by the relentless assault of the Korilian Empire, leaving Earth as the final refuge. Humankind's last hope rests on the tactical prowess of Admiral Jon McCarthy and the foresight of the Nexus House, an ancient conclave of clairvoyants who have long guided humanity's path.

Seventeen-year-old Truth Medici scavenges for scraps to eat; weathers his parents' abuse; and battles derelicts, killer pimps, and demons in the soul-crushing stretch of desperation he calls home. Even the cops steer clear of the toxic Harban slums. But just across the canal live the magical elite, with their wealth, flying carpets, gorgeous mages, and custom spell beasts, all thanks to the patronage of the almighty Starbrite Corporation. Getting there, and taking his three vulnerable siblings with him, is Truth's only dream.

After thirty-three years of peace, the millennia-spanning House War reignites with brutal force. The galaxy trembles as the Corvad House, a dynasty once thought vanquished, emerges from the shadows with a vengeance. In a precarious alliance with the Colonial Council, the Corvad goal is the complete obliteration of the Nexus House, the guardians who have steered humanity through its darkest epochs.

The Earth lies shaken in the aftermath of a conspiracy. Some of the smartest minds on the planet have striven for and died in an effort to scour the skies of four vast alien satellites, but their success has brought a terrible vengeance down upon us. While alien agents stalk the Earth, a team of exhausted scientists and military outcasts struggle to fight them among a planet on the brink - the brink of plague, the brink of war, and the brink of an invasion larger than they can possibly imagine. But they have allies.

Things have gone bad among the colonies. Insurgents are building alien-hybrid armies and planet-killing weapons, threatening to upend the fragile balance of power in Province 921. There's not only trouble in the province—the Core Worlds are igniting as well. The Mogwa have asserted claims upon the Imperial Throne, causing their rivals to move against them. Earth's Hegemony and the rebels are pulled into a conflict that could tear the galaxy apart.

We have arrived. Descent is in progress. Ryan Pierce traded military life for a peaceful existence in Napa Valley. Everything was fine until the starships appeared. As aliens overtake the land and obscure the sun, Ryan quickly grasps that no one's coming to rescue them. He can't save the world...

Karl Meier is a private in the German Army. He's been sent to occupied Greece on a secret mission in late 1944 as the Wehrmacht is withdrawing from the country. Karl has been assigned to support Professor Johannes Schmidt in the excavation of the ruins at Delphi, searching for a wunderwaffe—a wonder weapon that could help Germany win the Second World War. Deep within a cave, he finds a golden orb. On touching it, Karl connects with an alien intelligence that has sat dormant on Earth for thousands of years—the Oracle.

The last living astronaut to walk on the Moon has been murdered… Silas visits his estranged grandfather's lakehouse in the aftermath of the deadly home invasion. What he discovers hidden below the floorboards triggers a mystery buried since the final trip to the Moon, over fifty years earlier. Rory returns to her family home in Vermont to write her second novel, but fate has a different story in mind. Her reunion is shattered when she's thrust into danger revolving around the same tokens.

A self-proclaimed Tyrant controls the colony ship still orbiting overhead—a fortress that should have been dismantled to build their new world. Armed with surveillance drones and brutal enforcers, he's turned a struggling settlement into his personal kingdom. Anyone who defies him vanishes into the ship above, never to return.

The Shift is closed between Earth and Arcadia. The residents of Lost Town acclimate to their new reality. They are forever stuck on another planet, with only each other to rely on. Amelia, anxious to see more of their home, travels with Milton's old map-filled journal, discovering an ancient civilization. John is eager to start a new life, until tragedy strikes at the heart of Lost Town. Restarting from scratch isn't ideal, but the locals will do anything to succeed.

Only a few short months after humanity's first interstellar flights, the first shots have been fired in what will eventually become known as the Alliance Wars. Terran Fleet Command teeters on the edge of chaos in the aftermath of Chairwoman Crull's removal from power, while in space, Earth's defense falls squarely on the shoulders of Admiral Kevin Patterson. With only a small number of ships capable of bringing the fight to the enemy, he makes the bold decision to divide his forces, meeting the Resistance task force head-on at two separate locations.

Contains books one and two of The Stasis Stories: A Pause in Space-Time (Book 1) and The Thunder of Engines (Book 2). Kaem Seba is a sickly and financially destitute young man with extraordinary math skills. With the help of Arya Vaii, a business student, he has developed a theory and an electronic device that allows him to stop time within limited volumes of space-time.

If Truth Medici has learned anything, it’s that the country isn’t neatly divided into safe and dangerous zones. Everywhere is a battlefield and a hunting ground. Everyone is both predator and prey, slumrats on the run from bigger rats. Truth is finally one of the bigger rats, so elite that ordinary people can’t even see him. But though he may be a walking ghost, he’ll be acknowledged one way or another. Truth holds the power to slay the very oppressors who made him what he is. And he’s resolved to wield this power toward a righteous end.

Captain Jackson Wolfe never thought he'd see the end of the Phage War in his lifetime. The enemy was too powerful, too numerous, and utterly determined to exterminate humanity. But the appearance of a new ally in the fight has changed all of that. For the first time since the original incursion, Wolfe thinks that maybe there's a chance to stop their implacable enemy before they have the chance to wipe out any more human planets.