Search Results for: captain,-the

Jennifer is in prison for an undisclosed crime. Denied companionship, she escapes into her memory and imagination.

Peggy Maybee, Jennifer’s ancestor, was transported for stealing a peacock. This is all that is known about Peggy but Jennifer conjures a life for her aboard a convict ship bound for Botany Bay.

A partial eclipse of the moon used by the captain as inspiration for a sermon triggers a mutiny and, amidst the chaos of brawling thieves, cut-throats, whores and crew, Peggy makes a bid for freedom …

‘Brilliant, seductive and assured’ Nick Hornby

A woman dies by violence aboard the Santa Cristina. A radio flash from the West Indies brings word of an apparently related death. A man’s body turns up, and in his hand is a suicide note written in one woman’s handwriting but signed with another woman’s name.

But what part does the jar of blood play – and why is everyone so interested in the contents of a certain package wrapped in cherub-bedecked paper? That’s the puzzle Captain Urizar has to solve in a case with a startling showdown.

The sensational events of the summer of 1907 – the disappearance of the Ascot Gold Cup from the Royal Enclosure, and the even more astonishing theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from a locked and guarded strongroom in Dublin Castle – remain mysterious but apparently random events. Only one man knows their secret.

Captain Richard Gaudeans, cashiered officer, conman and cracksman, cuts a more appropriate figure among the fairground booths where he earns his living than the corridors of power. But the course of the year takes him into both. And in both he uses his skill and cunning to outmanoeuvre everyone in his path.

Dany Ashton is invited to spend a holiday at her stepfather’s house in Zanzibar – the mysterious ‘House of Shade’, where Captain Rory Frost buried a fortune in gold a hundred years before – but even before her plane takes off there is a stolen passport, a midnight intruder, and a murder.

And it isn’t long before the air of gaiety and nonchalance that opens the tropical house party fades into dawning terror, as Dany and the rest of the house-guests learn that one amongst them is determined to take the hidden treasure – at any cost.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

A New Kind of War takes us back to the Greece and Germany of 1945 – as the old kind of war comes to its official end. Why has David Audley broken the British-Greek truce? And furthermore, why did his brigadier order his actions? Is it just coincidence that Audley is surprised near Delphi by Captain Fattorini of the Royal Engineers? As a result of that unfortunate encounter, Fattorini finds himself in occupied Germany as the newest member of TRR-2: a special Intelligence unit engaged in a dangerous and brutal game. It is not until he at last meets Audley’s mysterious brigadier that Fattorini learns the full truth about his own assignment in the ill-omened Teutoburg Forest.

The Middle East. 1941. Captain Oliver Enwin, interpreter for British Intelligence, has gone missing and it is up to one of his fellow officers, the story’s narrator, to track him down. In the course of his investigations of a colonel’s widow and her daughter, Valerie, living a lonely life in a high valley in Lebanon, he comes across the trail of the missing officer.

But the narrator’s life is also threatened, and he must forge a pact with the man he has been sent to find, as well as making both women his allies. But who can be trusted in such uncertain times? And will the two men alone be able to suppress a German-inspired Arab revolt that threatens all their lives?

When a yacht explodes in the Bahamas, apparently killing six people, Sam Boyleston, an attorney from Texas and the brother of one of the victims, is compelled to investigate the circumstances, as does Raoul Kelly, a newspaper reporter.

After the disaster the yacht’s burned captain was temporarily marooned on a small island, and soon it becomes apparent that one person is ruthlessly manipulating events. But for Boyleston and Kelly proving guilt appears impossible …

‘A major suspense novel’ New York Times

The mortal kingdoms are caught up in a shared catastrophe, cursed with sterility by the magic of the dark elves. Still, what elves have caused they may perhaps put right.

Humanity’s last hope hinges on a magical talisman-the Pica Stone. One of only nine solid objects ever created by magic, the Pica Stone was shattered in the days of the last Wizards. But when Captain, oldest of the elves, joins with his fellow light elves to work a spell to draw together all the scattered pieces of this legendary gem, eight shards remain missing, lost on worlds throughout the planes of existence.

The elves spell-shift a party of questers to each of these worlds to find the shards. Among the chosen are the Renshai warrior Kevral, her husband Ra-khir the knight, and Tae, a newly made prince and former thief. Each world offers unique challenges, but with the extinction of the human race as the price of failure, there can be no turning back….

Seeking the answer to the mystery of life, Captain Oswald Bastable visits the Temple of the Future Buddha and is thrown through time to a new twentieth century. Plague, anarchy and superstition rule the world where he finds himself. Bands of diseased mutants pillage the continents while pirate U-boats prowl the oceans.

But from this chaos emerges Black Attila, commander of the African Hordes and master of the most terrible weapon ever devised by Man – the Land Leviathan, a terrifying ziggurat on wheels, a moving mountain of deadly artillery.

At last, after centuries of cruel oppression, the Land Leviathan helps the Black Attila establish Black Power on an unimaginable, global scale. Unimaginable, that is, to anyone except Michael Moorcock who has re-written the history of the twentieth century in his own totally original, biting style.

It is 1973, and the stately airships of the Great Powers hold benign sway over a peaceful world. The balance of power is maintained by the British Empire – a most equitable and just Empire, ruled by the beloved King Edward VIII. A new world order, with peace and prosperity for all under the law. Yet, moved by the politics of envy and perverse utopianism, not all of the Empire’s citizens support the marvelous equilibrium.

Flung from the North East Frontier of 1902 into this world of the future, Captain Oswald Bastable is forced to question his most cherished ideals, discovering to his horror that he has become a nomad of the time streams, eternally doomed to travel the wayward currents of a chaotic multiverse.

The first in the trilogy, The Warlord of the Air sees Bastable fall in with the anarchists of this imperial society and set in train a course of events more devastating than he could ever have imagined.

The Galaxy is a big place, made up of thousands of millions of worlds, and the work of exploration will probably never be entirely completed. But various systems within the Galaxy, each with its own particular humanoid race if intelligent beings, have joined in galactic federation for the mutual good of all concerned. Once major snag remained: speedy communication.

When space travel velocities were increased by the introduction of 5C drive on all but local planetary working vessels the way was opened to enormously expanded regions of movement. Piet Tek, captain of a space tramp, tells of what happened when the secret of instantaneous communication was prematurely exploited by unscrupulous people in search of power.

Is he George Whitley, a twentieth-century writer of science fiction – or Peter Quinn, Second Officer of the interstellar liner Lode Maiden?

An injection of lysergic acid and Whitley finds himself … where … who … and in what age? He is inhabiting the body of Second Officer Quinn but his mind is still that of George Whitley.

Aboard the Lode Maiden he can capture only fragments of Quinn’s memory and consciousness, until a magnetic storm throws the ship off trajectory into the deep reaches of space. Then, somehow, enough knowledge comes to him to enable him to help land the ship on an unnamed planet on the Galactic Rim.

But the forced landing damages the ship and kills the Captain, leaving Quinn – or is it Whitley? – to lead the crew and passengers to safety through the horrors and dangers of the unknown planet.

Her ex-Imperial Highness of Outer Space had developed a conscience. With a well-armed space cruiser on her hands, she didn’t want to sell it to just anyone – that is, anyone under Empire control. So the former Empress and her ex-space captain husband became mercenaries for GLASS – the Galactic League for the Abolition of Suppression and Slavery.

Their first assignment was blockade-running, to bring antibiotics to the plague-ridden humans on Antrim, besieged by the Halicheki bird-people and ignored by the Empire. Only, this would be a ticklish business for they could not fire one shot at the Halicheki without being legally termed pirates. And although the ex-Empress and her husband were open-minded enough to try all sorts of devious tricks, the prospect of being hanged for piracy by the Empress’ successor did not appeal to either of their natures…

A journey to the Rim Worlds takes you straight to the edge of the unknown or right to the gaping void of the abyss. Out there you’re beyond the borders, hovering between the warped contours of troubled space and time…

Captain Clavering bought his ship on a lottery win. Now he’s holed up on the dismal planet of Lorn filling in the time on a chemical-blasted airstrip waiting for a contract. Somewhere there must be a newly colonized planet needing charters or some threatened world that needs evacuating. He’d risk anything for money in the bank – even a dodgy landing on the gas-blasted plains of Eblis, if the Rim Runners fancy paying hard cash for an expedition to hell…

Set in the far future, Space Chantey chronicles the adventures of Space Captain Roadstrum and his crew, on a journey through galaxies resonant with myth and peril as Roadstrum valiantly battles to return across the cosmos to Big Tulsa, the Capital of the World, and to his wife and young son Tele-Max.

Kemlo, captain of Space scouts, and his young friend Krillie receive a visit from two Earth children, Dane and Lesa, Krillie’s cousins. Lesa is quite prepared to be thrilled by all that she sees on Satellite Belt K, but Dane sneers at everything – especially at the mechanical horse in the games-room. he boasts of his own prowess, and is heard by their science engineering master from Earth, who determines to teach him a lesson and at the same time to evolve, with the help of Kemlo and the other troop leaders, a new mechanical wonder, a New World Pegasus, a horse that can gallop in Space…

In his long and fabulous career as the Captain Hornblower of space, John Grimes was to experience many strange things, rising through the ranks of the Interstellar Federation – from triumph to disaster – and ultimately becoming the most famous of the Rim Runners, far out along the edge of the Milky Way.

But there was a period when Grimes fell between one cosmic empire and another, on his own, commander of a single deep-space pinnace and looking for work.

And that was when he became a god! He thought he was just doing a mailman’s job, bu the price of the postage turned out to be divinity – with a lovely nude postmistress certified for a goddess!

The Far Traveler was hardly the sort of starship to use in the study of lost space colonies. Lost colonies were likely to be desperate, eccentric and otherwise unappreciative. And The Far Traveler was a rich woman’s toy, constructed of gold and directed by an omniscient, dictatorial and feminine computer known as Big Sister.

John Grimes had become that golden vessel’s captain. A captain in name only because nobody could talk back to Big Sister or the haughty beauty who owned everything aboard. But Grimes was a man of many resources and lost space colonies were placed that did not observe the civilized rules. You could be sure, therefore, that the man known as the Commodore Hornblower of Outer Space would be likely to come through okay, even if the ladies – mechanical and physical – never expected him to!

Originally written as a play and performed at the Mermaid Theatre, Easter 1962.

It is the early 20th century. Man is seeking signs of life elsewhere in the universe, but all exploratory ships have been lost without a trace – except for DSP15. Thirty years after leaving earth, and given up for lost, DSP15 suddenly appears on radar screens at the space station at Mildenhall, England. Her crew had been frozen to prevent ageing, and as the ship settles to a landing, Dr Richard Warboys eagerly awaits with other scientists for word of what DSP15 has found. But there is no crew, only a message scratched into a metal surface, signed by the captain: “If this ship returns to Earth, then mankind is in deadly peril – God help you – ” And so Earth becomes accidentally involved in a cosmic battle against a virtually omnipotent alien power, in a story suspenseful and exciting from cover to cover.

Earth was threatened with attach from the huge space-fleets of the Hundred Suns of Andromeda – an attack that the Terran Fleet could not hope to defeat.

Only one chance remained to prevent Earth’s destruction, and that was the chance that a skilled and experienced saboteur might just have time strike his blow before the enemy could launch the attack.

It was Captain Blair whose mission this became, and it was his ace-saboteur who raced against death in planet after planet, as the zero-hour approached when Earth would face the attacking fleets of DARK ANDROMEDA.

The remains of an exploded radio-active planet reach the outer solar system in the course of their plunge across interstellar space. A massive fragment crashes into Pluto. Earth’s scientists determine that it is set to mutate into pure energy which will explode Pluto and threaten the equilibrium of the solar system. A mission is quickly mounted for a spaceship to reach Pluto and neutralise the meteorite before it can trigger a chain reaction. The problem is that the crew will have only 110 hours to reach Pluto, which means a constant acceleration and intense, prolonged physical suffering for the crew, The authoritarian Captain Rapier has his hands full to save the mission when mutiny breaks out…

Artemesia is the daughter of a pirate queen, and she’s sick of practising deportment at the Angels Academy for Young Maidens. Escaping from the school, she hunts up her mother’s crew and breezily commands them out to sea in a leaky boat. Unfortunately, Art’s memories of her early life may not be accurate-her seasick crew are actors, and Art’s infamous mother was the darling of the stage in a pirate drama. But fiery, pistol-proof Art soon shapes her men into the cleverest pirate crew afloat. And when they meet the dread ship Enemy and her beautiful, treacherous captain, Goldie Girl, Art is certain that her memories are real. The Seven Seas aren’t large enough for two pirate queens: Art will have the battle of her life to win her mother’s title – and the race for the most fabulous treasure in pirate lore.

They had reached the very limits of space. Nothing lay ahead except the evil planet, waiting to destroy.

NOTES FROM CAPTAIN BRONET’S LOG:
It looked like a lizard, or a snake with legs. It had a large flattish head, three eyes set in triangular formation, and a round food-intake in the centre of the “face.” There was no chin. The head perched high on a mottled, leathery neck. The skin on its back was ribbed and corrugated. This creature was the first living thing we encountered on the sinister planet…

Blake had waited a long time for his big chance. Finally the selection board called him in. This was it. He got his promotion, his captain’s ticket and his first assignment. Vorgal was a tough planet but Blake was ready for it. He was the first spaceman to land on Vorgal without crashing. He was the first human being to see a Vorgalian and live. He was the first to learn the planet’s deadly secret an come back alive.

But…when he went into landing orbit around Earth they fired on him. No one would believe that the impossible had happened. They thought Blake’s body was being used by an alien, and unless he could convince them fast he would die. Without his secret knowledge of Vorgal, Earth would die too…