Collision Course

Kylie Rhoads is a junker. She makes her living traveling the stars, salvaging abandoned ships left over from pirate attacks on the edge of the Gedri system. Some of the hulls are legal for the taking, most aren't. When a salvage job goes bad, Kylie finds herself on the wrong end of a gun. The hand holding that gun? The SA Space Force, just the people Kylie wants to avoid. To avoid prison, Kylie makes a deal to go deep into the Gedri System and rescue a simple girl. But out on the fringe, nothing is as it seems.

Rika is a scout mech. Once human, now she is the property of the Genevian military. Rika's crime was small, stealing food. But when faced with a five-year prison term, or conscription in the Genevian military, she chose war. She had no idea what that conscription would entail. Now little of Rika's human body remains, and she serves as an SMI-2 scout mech, the meat inside a cyborg body. She, and others like her, are sent in ahead of the human soldiers to tip the scales of war.

Sera leads a simple life. A little smuggling, some drinking contests, and captaining her star freighter, Sabrina. But when she picks up a mysterious shipping container on Coburn Station, things begin to go wrong. She finds herself at odds with The Mark, a dangerous pirate organization that wants the cargo on her ship. Inside the container she not only finds a woman, but a secret thought lost millennia ago.

This is an omnibus edition of Episodes 4-6 in season 1 of the Aeon 14 Perseus Gate series. It contains: The Last Bastion of Star City: Jessica had never imagined such a place as Star City existed, let alone that something like a Bastion protected it, The Toll Road Between the Stars: No one ever said that travelling ten thousand light years would be easy..., and The Final Stroll on Perseus's Arm: An old foe from Finaeus's past reveals a secret that will save the crew.

All Systems Red is the tense first science fiction adventure novella in Martha Wells' series The Murderbot Diaries. For fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch series, or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. The main character is a deadly security droid that has bucked its restrictive programming and is balanced between contemplative self-discovery and an idle instinct to kill all humans.