Picture this: you've somehow come into the possession of a dragon (long story--you can read the previous book if you really want to know, but it's kinda embarrassing, so you don't need to).
And you need to return that dragon to the place it came from.
You've tried putting it on a truck--but it destroyed the truck.
You've tried putting it on the train--but it destroyed the carriage.
Now you've put the dragon in a warehouse while you figure out what to do, but--
You guessed it: the dragon destroys the warehouse.
Tell me, why wouldn't you trick some rich merchant into lending you the only thing you haven't yet tried: a boat.
Trouble is, the merchant's price is that you return an old artefact to the whale kingdom along the way.
Whales are not nice. They're very big. They're cranky. And, here is a secret: they hate dragons.
They especially hate dragons.
When Perrin was so desperate that he applied for a job with the Bureau of Magic Abuse, there were two things he didn't realise. One, that he might actually get the job and two, that it would involve working with magic sniffers.
And what an annoyance the creatures are. They keep him up at night, need to feed on expensive fresh fruit and cause him embarrassment.
A new inn opens in town and patrons flock to it. Perrin checks it out for forbidden magic, finds none but something doesn’t add up. Is it the stranger, clearly a wizard, who makes little effort to cover up his illegal activities? Is it the owner of the new inn, who can’t possibly have accumulated enough money to buy the place? Or is it the unfailingly raving reviews?
Something fishy is going on, and his boss at the Bureau doesn't even want him to investigate. But Perrin has never let that stop him.
Of all the things ten-year-old Cory Wilson expects to do when he moves to Midway Space Station, saving aliens from humans isn't one.
An important conference is about to start at the station, not usually the sort of thing kids care about, not even when the conference is between humans and aliens, and half your family is alien. However, when bullies tease Cory, he ends up in a prohibited area where he overhears some men planning to plant a bomb at the conference.
Because the terrorists hide their messages in computer games, no one believes Cory, not even his father, the station director. Kids at school think he’s crazy, some even think aliens should be bombed.
The conference starts, the aliens have brought a very important person, and Cory's teacher, one of the terrorists, locks Cory in the classroom.
Can he get out in time? If he does, will anyone listen?
For three months, Cory and his team have hung with Asto's military in orbit, watching as drone armies attacked Earth.
They could have helped more had Nations of Earth communicated with the fleet or if they could only find out where these drones come from, who controls them and from where. The enemy is smart, enmeshed with sections of Earth's population and Asto's military severely hamstrung by Nations of Earth playing chicken.
Three months ago, the president contacted Cory asking for help. The connection was interrupted and never re-established.
It's as if they don't want help.
Cory's got gamra breathing down his neck with the requirement that Nations of Earth officially approves the presence of Asto's military in orbit.
Something has to give.
He and his team return to a battle-scarred Earth on a hare-brained mission to talk to Nations of Earth, to check on the president, to get him to sign for approval. Getting there is hard. The state of the Nations of Earth assembly is deeply troubling. But getting out, that's where it gets truly interesting.
The shocking conclusion to the Moonfire Trilogy.
Lana han Chevonian is one of the world’s brightest minds on the brink of making a huge discovery. There is only one problem: she is stuck as prisoner in the harem of the Aranian king. She could try to escape and run the risk of getting re-captured or getting killed on the very long and difficult road back home to Chevakia, or she could win the favour of the king, beg to be allowed to use the famed library and promise Arania credit for her work.
Meanwhile, war is about to break out between Aranian armies with icefire weapons and Chevakian armies wanting to wipe those weapons off the face of the earth.
Lana’s discovery turns the understanding about icefire on its head, but no one is listening. They’re on course to destroy everything that’s keeping the world alive.
Sanity is a lone voice crying in the desert.
The world is under increasing threat from as yet undiscovered sources of icefire, but all the people who have answers are cut off from the authorities, kings or councils, with the power to mobilise the scientists and armies to keep the world safe.
Young meteorology student Javes is stuck in the remote desert of the north. The area bristles with technology of an ancient past, but he cannot tell anyone about it because roads and telegraph lines have been cut by bad weather and invading bandits.
Lana, a fellow student, is on her way to meet him, but Aranian soldiers raid the bus that she's travelling on. She is taken to the capital to serve at the king's court.
Tina and her crew finally arrive on Olympus, the world that holds the Federacy Assembly. Her initial plan was to go there to present the data the left in a locker on Kelso Station fifteen years earlier, but many things have changed.
For one, rather than wait for someone else to do it, she and the scientists they collected at Aurora Station have been working on a cure for the infection that turns people into grey-skinned mutant pirates.
Secondly, they're bringing a stricken war ship and a few of its remaining crew members who were rescued from pirate captivity.
Little has gone to plan. After a few attempts, they don't yet have a cure. And while the infection does horrendous things to people besides giving them a long, but miserable, life, it seems that the only way it spreads is through human intervention.
Tina and her friends are about to make a few discoveries about power, who wields it, and how it is used in this conclusion to the Project Charon series. The betrayal runs much deeper than anyone has predicted. Those in power are not going to take their uncovering lying down.
The entire world laid to waste. There are no second chances.
The ancient machine that produced icefire was destroyed twenty years ago, but the deadly magic is again on the increase. No one understands why or where it’s coming from.
Massive changes in weather patterns plunge the northern half of the inhabited world in deep drought. People are once again fleeing, but nowhere is safe.
King Isandor sends people to investigate a concentration of icefire in the mountains at the border, but two consecutive patrols both vanish. It appears that, after having suffered badly in wars, the neighbouring country Arania is on the offensive, and is using icefire as weapon. Their culture is harsh and their barbarism knows no boundaries.
Meanwhile two young meteorology students make a string of discoveries that will change the way the people understand the world. They’re on the threshold of the age of enlightenment, but vital knowledge necessary to save their world may well get lost when war overruns the inhabited world.
Melati escaped New Jakarta space station when it fell into Allion's hands. Her family was left behind the enemy lines.
She signed up for active duty with the International Space Force in the hope they would liberate the station. Instead, they chose to maintain a crippling siege that has lasted for ten months.
A small ship escapes from the station with on board a single male occupant whose mind appears to have been wiped.
With her skills in artificial mindbases, Melati is part of the team that tries to get information out of him.
He could be a human Trojan horse sent by Allion and his calls for help nothing more than a trap to get ISF to send people to the station. Or he could be a genuine escapee from the station where the recycling processes have collapsed and ten thousand civilians have mere weeks until they die of asphyxiation. Either way, the time for watching and waiting is over. War is about to begin.
Tina had no choice but to escape Aurora Station on board the Starfighter Manila: the ship was about to blow up and would have killed the entire station.
But they're in deep trouble. They have less than half the very minimum crew number necessary to fly the ship safely, the engines are damaged and Tina's travel companions are on a different ship.
Aurora Station fell into pirate hands, so returning is not an option and the ship isn't safe to fly long distances.
On top of that, several crew members may have been exposed to genetic treatment by the pirates and may be turning into violent monstrous creatures.
With no outside help forthcoming, survival becomes an intense battle.
A few years ago, a military doctor walking the corridors of New Jakarta Station saved Melati's life. She signed up for the International Space Force to pay back her moral debt to him. But her family thinks she has betrayed her people. It was ISF who forcefully removed their grandmothers and grandfathers from the crowded slums of Jakarta to work in interstellar space stations.
It is Melati's job to teach six-year old construct soldiers, artificial humans grown in labs and activated with programmed minds. Her latest cohort has one student who claims that he is not a little boy, but a mindbase traveller whose swap partner took off with his body. It soon becomes clear that a lot of people are scouring the station for this fugitive, a scientist with dangerous knowledge.
The best place to hide in the station is amongst the many cultures and subcultures of the expat Indonesian B-sector. Looking for him brings Melati into direct conflict with her people. She does not want to be seen as one of the enemy, but if the scientist's knowledge falls in the wrong hands, war will come to the station.
Cory has made several commitments to members of the Asto inner circles. He needs to spend time with Thayu's son. He has also been asked to give a favour to a boy of the Azimi clan.
What better to do with a couple of pre-teens than to visit the theme parks that are historic relics from the 21st century on Earth?
Of course he has a hidden agenda. On a previous trip to the south of Barresh, Cory and his team found disturbing evidence that people from the former Southern California Air Corps made it to Ceren about fifty years ago. He needs to find out about them.
Except this is 2125, and the former city of Los Angeles is in Mexico, and the interesting places are across the heavily guarded and impenetrable border in America Free State.
While he's investigating, while he's being shadowed and occasionally threatened, while the kids are having old-fashioned fun going on rides and starting rebellions (oops), something is about to come to a spectacular crash.
It's not that the highly armed rebels of America Free State want to take back land that they consider theirs, although they do.
It's not the fact that Nations of Earth president Simon Dekker hates Cory and the fact that he's poking around in what Dekker considers his territory, although he does.
It's that the Southern California Air Corps is about to pull a very large and nasty surprise.
