Search Results for: Daedalus

Lieutenant Commander Shaila Jain has been given the assignment of her dreams: the first manned mission to Saturn. But there’s competition and complications when she arrives aboard the survey ship Armstrong. The Chinese are vying for control of the critical moon Titan, and the moon Enceladus may harbor secrets deep under its icy crust. And back on Earth, Project DAEDALUS now seeks to defend against other dimensional incursions. But there are other players interested in opening the door between worlds . . . and they’re getting impatient.

For Thomas Weatherby, it’s been nineteen years since he was second lieutenant aboard HMS Daedalus. Now captain of the seventy-four-gun Fortitude, Weatherby helps destroy the French fleet at the Nile and must chase an escaped French ship from Egypt to Saturn, home of the enigmatic and increasingly unstable aliens who call themselves the Xan. Meanwhile, in Egypt, alchemist Andrew Finch has ingratiated himself with Napoleon’s forces . . . and finds the true, horrible reason why the French invaded Egypt in the first place.

The final contact made by the Daedalus Mission begins badly, even before the ship makes a hard landing in the middle of nowhere. The situation of the colony doesn’t seem to make any sense, and neither does the situation of the indigenous aliens–the Sets–that have helped the colony survive and thrive. Alex Alexander doesn’t take long to work out a hypothesis that might explain the mystery–a hypothesis that the people on the ground have already worked out for themselves–and he’s fortunate enough to fall in with a colonist who’s obsessively determined to prove the hypothesis. Unfortunately, the quest seems likely to become so dangerous that both of them might die trying–and there’s too much at stake not to take it to the very limit of possibility, no matter what the cost.

The planet Attica has two continents: Lambda and Delta. The indigenous alien population being restricted to Delta, Earth’s colony was planted on Lambda. Before the arrival of the Daedalus, two sailing ships had set out from Lambda to cross the ocean separating the two continents, and neither had returned. Now a third is on its way, and Mariel Valory and Alex Alexander of the Daedalus have hitched a lift, in order that Mariel might use her talent to try to make contact with the aliens. Unfortunately, it turns out that contact has already been made, and that the aliens are building an empire with the aid of borrowed Terran technology–an empire that’s beginning to crack under its internal strains and eternal challenges. And when Alex and Mariel are marooned by their reluctant hosts, things start to go from very bad to much worse….

The fourth landing of the Daedalus Mission confronts Alex and his companions with a colonial culture seemingly modeled on a classic Utopian dream, but all of its inhabitants are infected with a mysterious alien parasite, and they no longer seem entirely human. Are they being controlled by the parasite, or has the parasite merely enabled them to transform themselves? Can the visitors from Earth avoid infection themselves, and what will the consequences be if they cannot? For once, the risks of the contact seem potentially far greater than any possible reward – but that still leaves the visitors with the necessity of passing judgment and deciding what to do, in an exceedingly awkward situation.

The colony was successful. That was evident as soon as the recontact ship Daedalus had landed. It was successful, prosperous, and everything was due to the work and genius of J. Wildeblood, biochemist and planetary leader.

This world now bore the name of its benefactor. And it was truly his empire, with a grateful, hard-working people heeding every wish of his descendants.

But the suspicious scientific minds of the Daedalus‘s special crew were very uneasy. Was Wildeblood’s Empire all it seemed – or was there a structure invisible to the eyewhich spelled out something a lot more blood-curdling?

They call them the “rat-catchers.” They’re the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost colonies in space. Alex Alexander, the ship’s biologist, together with his staff, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home.

Dendra is a stable world, covered by a huge, unchanging forest-except that nothing living can really be free of change. The planet has no seasons, but its animal life still undergoes life-cycles involving birth, maturation, metamorphosis, and death. The Earth colony sent to tame the world has failed, at least in the terms expected of it, and seems beyond redemption; but the crew of the Daedalus still has to find out exactly why and how the program has gone wrong. Provided, of course, that they can survive the investigation itself!

They call them the “rat-catchers.” They’re the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost space colonies. Alex Alexander, ship’s biologist, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home. The planet Floria initially appears to be one of the few Earth colonies that’s actually prospered since its initial settlement. But underneath the surface of the society, the “Planners” keep a strict, repressive rule over the Florians, while the police are apparently attempting to assert their own authority. But is either group actually what they seem?