Showing results by author "David Drake" in All Categories

Captain Daniel Leary with his friend–and spy–Officer Adele Mundy are sent to a quiet sector to carry out an easy task: helping the local admiral put down a coup before it takes place. But then the jealous admiral gets rid of them by sending them off on a wild goose chase to a sector where commerce is king and business is carried out by extortion and gunfights. With anarchy and rebellion in the air, a rogue intelligence officer plots the war that will destroy civilization and enlists the help of a brute whom even torturers couldn't stomach.

Heed the Slammers Battle Cry! A warrior's truth: "In the long run, everybody's dead. So screw the long run!" Patriotic hoo-ha may be well and good for recruitment parades, but David Drake's battle-hardened mercenaries know it takes tanks, guns, and grit to win when the real fighting flares. Yet peace brings its own problems to old soldiers - for killing potential enemies in battle is self-limiting, but once the killing starts in peacetime, there may be no end to the madness.

Colonel Alois Hammer: to the galaxy, a legendary commander of mercenaries. To his troops, a leader who can be trusted to always back them to the hilt - and meet a payroll. When the situation on a planet has gone beyond desperate, it's time to call for Hammer's Slammers.

The truce between Cinnabar and the Alliance is holding, and the Republic of Cinnabar Navy is able to explore regions of the galaxy without the explorers being swept up in great power conflict. The Far Traveller is probing sponge space to open routes for Cinnabar traders - and for RCN warships if war breaks out again. But besides astrogation, the Far Traveller is to survey and catalog life forms on the worlds it touches.

Roy Olfetrie planned to be an officer in the Republic of Cinnabar Navy, but when his father was unmasked as a white-collar criminal he had to take whatever he was offered. What is offered turns out to be a chance to accompany Captain Daniel Leary and Lady Adele Mundy as they go off to start a war that will put Roy at the sharp end.

Aide, a human soul embodied in a jewel, journeys back in time to join forces with Belisarius, the greatest general of the sixth century, to stop Link, an evil supercomputer that is using its vast powers to rewrite history to create the powerful, technologically advanced Malwa Empire. 

Daniel Leary is Cinnabar's most successful space captain; His friend, Lady Adele Mundy, is its most efficient spy - but they've got their hands full. From palace to reeking jungle, from gunfights in grimy hangars, to the flagship's bridge during a sprawling space battle, Leary and Mundy are in the thick of it again. Watch the galaxy explode In the Stormy Red Sky.

While the Republic of Cinnabar is at peace with the Alliance, warriors like Lt. Daniel Leary and Signals Officer Adele Mundy must find other work, like escorting a pair of wealthy nobles on an expedition to the back of beyond!

Riots blaze in the streets of Cinnabar, threatening not only the Government but the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. The forces of the tyrannical Alliance are probing outnumbered Cinnabar garrisons among the distant stars, using guile and treachery as well as brute strength.

Cinnabar's chief spymaster is a mother also - and her son is determined to search for treasure in the midst of a civil war. Who better to hold the boy's hand - and to take the blows directed at him - than Captain Daniel Leary, the Republic of Cinnabar Navy's troubleshooter, and his friend the cyberspy Adele Mundy? The only thing certain in the struggle for control of the mining planet Corcyra is that the rival parties are more dangerous to their own allies than to their opponents.

With the aid of a sentient battle computer, Raj Whitehall and his band of sworn Companions struggle to reunite the entire planet of Bellevue and find their mission impeded by Barholm Clerett. 

A monolithic computer is using General Raj Whitehall to reunite the planet and start humanity back on the road to technological achievement, but armies of musket- and saber-wielding barbarians stand in the way.

Daniel Leary is a lieutenant in the Republic of Cinnabar Navy with no money and no prospects since he quarreled with his ruthless, politically powerful father. Adele Mundy is a scholar with no money and no prospects since her family was massacred for conspiring against the Government of Cinnabar. Kostroma is a wealthy planet which depends on diplomacy to stay independent in a galaxy whose two great powers, Cinnabar and the Alliance, battle for supremacy.

Duisberg is one of thousands of planets plunged into darkness and chaos by the collapse of the galactic republic, but where other worlds have begun to rebuild a star-travelling culture, Duisberg remains in an uneasy balance between mud-brick civilization and bloodthirsty barbarism. The people of Duisberg have a god: Zentrum, a supercomputer from the ancient past. Zentrum has decided to avoid another collapse by preventing civilization from rising from where it is. This is known as the Stasis.

This collection of classic horror stories is sure to give you goose bumps, raise the hair on the back of your neck, and put some fright in your night. Includes Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper by Robert Bloch, Coin of the Realm by Charles L. Grant, Something Had to be Done by David Drake, The Graveyard Rats by Henry Kuttner, The Small Assassin by Ray Bradbury, Calling Card by Ramsey Campbell, The Words of Guru by C.M. Kornbluth, and Passengers by Robert Silverberg.

Duisberg is one of thousands of planets plunged into darkness and chaos by the collapse of the galactic republic, but where other worlds have begun to rebuild a star-travelling culture, Duisberg remains in an uneasy balance between mud-brick civilization and bloodthirsty barbarism. The people of Duisberg have a god: Zentrum, a supercomputer from the ancient past. Zentrum has decided to avoid another collapse by preventing civilization from rising from where it is. 

After the collapse of the galactic Web, civilizations crumbled and chaos reigned on thousands of planets. Only on planet Bellevue was there a difference. There, a Fleet Battle Computer named Center had survived from the old civilization. When it found Raj Whitehall, the man who could execute its plan for reviving human civilization, he and Center started Bellevue back on the road leading to the stars; and when Bellevue reached that goal, Center sent copies of itself and Raj to the thousands of worlds still waiting for the light of civilization to dawn.  

Planted by interstellar probes on hundreds of human-occupied worlds, the downloaded personalities of Raj Whitehall and the ancient battle computer known as Center work together for planetary unity. Their goal is to prepare those worlds for membership in the Second Federation of Man. But on one planet they do the opposite: on Visager they work to prevent unity.

In the time of the Ancients the universe was united - but that was so far in the past that not even memory remains, only the broken artifacts that a few Makers can reshape into their original uses. What survives is shattered into enclaves - some tiny, some ruined, some wild. Into the gaps between settlements, and onto the road that connects all human reality and the reality that is not human and may never have been human, have crept monsters.

Hammer's Slammer Don Slade is coming home to the planet Tethys, to his son and the woman he loves. But the space between is dark and cold. And the stars he must pass shine their light on planets which beckon to the weary traveler, planets which hold hidden dangers. And if Don Slade should ever reach Tethys... that is when the real fighting starts.