Short Stories

Amer earned a very lucrative living by protecting large corporations from terrorist attacks... and investing wisely, through short sales and put options, on companies that failed to heed his offered "protection."

But Amer's success brought challenges...

One bitterly cold Iowa night, an assailant slits the throats of twenty genetically modified pigs. Pressured by a giant biotechnology company and the county's power brokers, Deputy Matt Schaffer must untangle a web of clues to find the assailant--and bring justice to a desperate small town.

President Archer faced an imminent war in the Middle East.

The audio-visual recording crew following his every public move limited how he could resolve the crisis.

Or did they?

A captain, a commissar, and the ultimate crisis at 0.99c:

If your propulsion system goes off-line, how can you slow down?

A billion-year-old alien ship. A great treasure. A great danger.

With a last surge of the main drive, Barnet matched our bearing and speed with the alien derelict.

Twisted lines of tubing and conduit curled around the hull. After a billion years, micrometeor collisions had sandblasted the ship to a dull finish.

But behind that battered surface might lurk exotic materials beyond the manufacturing capability of any human world. Magnetic monopoles, dyons, condensed matter. Even a tiny amount delivered to Earth or a major world could set up a crew for life.

Powercrosse.

A zero-gee sport mixing the best of hockey and lacrosse.

Skill moves.

Big hits.

All while managing your team’s limited supply of jet pack air.

Her only chance to escape her home asteroid colony and choose a life for herself.

In its off-line data vault in Vienna, the biotech company Katalysis hid a gene therapy technology that could cure diseases and remake people into strange new forms. Could two young American hackers, and a jaded European agent, work together to penetrate the company's vault and release that new tech...

After the EU's army of war robots overran Mexico, Francisca and her daughter gathered refugees from the ruins and fled to a new home in the asteroid belt.

But the rogues and pirates roving the belt threatened her colony, poised to plunder the vein of nearly-pure blond—rubia—platinum in their asteroid's core.

Now help comes. Help Francisca loathes to ask. A renegade European and his war robot.

The war robot that might have killed her son.

Ashley clawed her way from her small, poor home town to the high-tech city, and vowed never to go back.

Big data from pervasive biosensors and the internet of things, stored in an unforgeable blockchain, enforced by algorithms instead of the whims of judges and juries, made Eric a multimillionaire.

Marry him, and Ashley's set for life. Even if he leaves her.

Unless his software detects she breaches the marital contract.

His position as a secret agent for the Ramuhlruus, Earth's alien overlords, gives him the perfect cover to conspire against them. But can he meet his contact before the Ramuhlruus uncover his secret agenda?

A billion people from the developing world wanted to work in the United States. As a lucky holder of a daypass, Chalo had the opportunity to teleport to his job, unless he overstayed his shift. Or lost his daypass.