Search Worlds Without End

This Nebula Award nominated short story originally appeared in the anthology Backblast Area Clear (2018), edited by Ellen Campbell. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF: Volume 5 (2019), edited by David Afsharirad.

Six Billion Dead--And One Man Intent on Putting a Stop to the Killing

For more than fifty years, the Terran Republic and the Terran League have been killing one another. The death toll has climbed ever higher, year after year, with no end in sight. But the members of the Five Hundred, the social elite of the Republic's Heart Worlds, don't care.

Their star systems are light-years from any threat of attack. Their children are sheltered from the "mandatory service" that falls so heavily on the Fringe Worlds' backs. Their trade connections with the Rishathan Sphere bring them wealth and influence. And their contracts to build ships, fighters, missiles, and all the other sinews of war have made them the wealthiest human beings in the history of the galaxy.

Rear Admiral Terrence Murphy is a Heart Worlder. His family is part of the Five Hundred. His wife is the daughter of one of the Five Hundred's wealthiest, most powerful industrialists. His sons and his daughter can easily avoid military service, and political power is his for the taking. There is no end to how high he can rise in the Republic's power structure.

All he has to do is successfully complete a risk-free military "governorship" in the backwater Fringe System of New Dublin without rocking the boat. Without dredging up any lunatic Fringe conspiracy theories. Without undercutting the Five Hundred's stranglehold on wealth and power.

But the people sending him to New Dublin have miscalculated, because Terrence Murphy is a man who believes in honor. Who believes in duty--in common decency and responsibility. Who believes there are dark and dangerous secrets behind the façade of what "everyone knows."

Terrence Murphy intends to meet those responsibilities and unearth those secrets, and he doesn't much care what the Five Hundred want.

He intends to put a stop to the killing.

Wherever that takes him, he will go. Whatever that costs him, he will pay. And whatever that requires, he will do.

Terrence Murphy is coming for whoever has orchestrated fifty-six years of bloodshed and slaughter, and Hell itself is coming with him.

A new novel in the world of In Fury Born, one of David Weber's most celebrated novels.

A YOUNG HERO JOURNEYS BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE IN A DESPERATE BID TO SAVE THE GALAXY FROM THE POWERS OF EVIL

ADVENTURE BEYOND THE STARS

Jayce Artan is a dock rat on a poor fringe world where he takes every job he can and prize-fights to earn enough money to get off world. When he's hired to guide a boat crewed by an interstellar mafia, he comes face to face with an ancient power--the Veil--that was pivotal to a civil war that ended decades ago.

Jayce is "Attuned" to this power and was almost killed by agents of the dead and defeated Tyrant who nearly enslaved the galaxy. He's rescued by an Adept of the Paragon order, warrior scholars that study the power and seek to keep any from upsetting the balance that keeps all life in order.

Jayce is given the chance to journey beyond the Veil and into another dimension where he can claim a stone of immense power and return it to base reality and wield it as a weapon against the Tyrant. The world beyond the Veil is nothing like what Jayce knows, and he'll be opposed by insidious evil, self-doubt, and sabotage from the very people who are supposed to help him.

While beyond the Veil, Jayce learns that a Conjunction is nigh, an event that could sunder the galaxy if evil forces succeed. Jayce must claim a Veil stone deep in the other dimension before the Tyrant's agents can beat him to the prize.