Showing results by publisher "audible originals" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

Lady Elyssa despises her echoes - the creatures who look just like her and copy her every move. But it’s only the echoes that mark her as a high noble, someone elite enough to marry the king’s youngest son, Jordan. She can’t get rid of the echoes, so instead she amuses herself by torturing them when no one is looking. But there’s something Elyssa doesn’t know: Her casual cruelty has brought one of the echoes to life. And this echo, Hope, is learning to think and speak and act on her own.

Brianna loves her new job as maid to Lady Marguerite. Like many high nobles, Marguerite is attended by echoes, silent creatures who look exactly like her and move in perfect synchronicity. News soon comes that Marguerite has been invited to the royal city as a potential bride for the crown prince. Brianna is delighted to accompany Marguerite to the city - and perhaps get a chance to continue her own flirtation with Nico, one of the king’s inquisitors. Then, disaster strikes on the road when they come under attack.

In the royal city of Camarria, a street urchin named Chessie lives by her wits, always attended by her two faithful friends, Red and Scar. What no one realizes is that the “friends” are really echoes, creatures that look exactly like their originals but who possess no volition of their own. Echoes normally are only born to high nobles, and Chessie doesn’t want anyone to start asking questions about her past. So she’s developed the ability to move between bodies so rapidly that she can maintain the illusion that she and Red and Scar are three separate people.

A collection of four ghostly tales inspired by M. R. James: Casting the Runes, Lost Hearts, The Treasure of Abbott-Thomas and A View from the Hill.

300 ans après les événements d'"Alien - La Sortie des Profondeurs" et "Alien - Le Fleuve des Souffrances", "Alien - La Mer des Désolations" retrace la redécouverte des Xénomorphes (Aliens) en état de sommeil dans les mines abandonnées de LV-178, le planétoïde d'"Alien - La Sortie des Profondeurs", désormais transformé et renommé New Galveston. La Weyland-Yutani Corporation, réformée après l'effondrement de l'armée du système des Nations Unies, poursuit ses efforts incessants pour armer les créatures.

Eine Totgeglaubte kämpft sich durch die lebensfeindliche Wüste des Mars. Mit ihrer Hilfe hofft die NASA-Basis auf dem Roten Planeten, ihr allergrößtes Problem zu lösen. Doch die Hoffnung zerbricht, weil eine unerwartete Bedrohung auftaucht, die alles zu zerstören droht, was sich der Rest der Menschheit bisher auf dem Planeten aufgebaut hat. Sie brauchen ein Wunder - oder einen Geist aus der Vergangenheit, dessen wahre Absichten niemand kennt.

300 ans après les événements d'"Alien - La Sortie des Profondeurs" et "Alien - Le Fleuve des Souffrances", "Alien - La Mer des Désolations" retrace la redécouverte des Xénomorphes (Aliens) en état de sommeil dans les mines abandonnées de LV-178, le planétoïde d'"Alien - La Sortie des Profondeurs", désormais transformé et renommé New Galveston. La Weyland-Yutani Corporation, réformée après l'effondrement de l'armée du système des Nations Unies, poursuit ses efforts incessants pour armer les créatures.

When treasure hunters excavate the long-lost wreck of the Steamship Arcadia from a Kansas corn field, a buried creature awakens - a mindless brute made of accursed earth, shaped like a man, but in no way mortal. A century and a half after its creation, the golem’s sole mission resumes: to assassinate a savage pro-slavery guerilla commander named “Bloody Bill” Wolcott. Wolcott, of course, is long dead, but his closest surviving descendant - a corporate IT burnout named Ben Middleton - is quite available.

Ein Raumschiff, das die Erde entweder retten oder zerstören wird. Vor einem Jahrhundert wurde das Wurmlochnetz der Erde zerstört und beendete den Handel mit ihren kolonisierten Planeten. Als plötzlich, nach Jahren ohne Kontakt zu den jüngeren Welten, ein riesiges Schiff am Rande des Sonnensystems auftaucht, ist die Menschheit schockiert. Neugierig aber auch vorsichtig startet die veraltete Raumflotte der Erde ihre Untersuchungen. Was sie von dem riesigen Schiff lernen, schockiert den Planeten. Die verlorenen Kolonien haben überlebt - aber das Wiedersehen wird kein glückliches.

They were sent to investigate the first extraterrestrial signal. What they found was beyond anything they could have imagined - or feared. On a voyage to a mysterious moon in the Alpha Centauri system, the UEA Centaurus meets with disaster. Only the quick thinking of the flight engineer, Rachel Terman, saves some of the crew. Crash-landing on the moon, trillions of kilometers from Earth, they struggle to carry out their mission and try to survive. But nothing has prepared them for what they will face.

Endlich hat es die NASA geschafft: Der erste Mensch hat soeben seinen Fuß auf die Oberfläche unseres Nachbarplaneten gesetzt. Doch die vier Astronauten der Mars-Expedition scheinen von unverschuldetem Unheil verfolgt: das Raumschiff einer privaten Organisation, das kurz nach ihnen eintrifft, havariert im Orbit. Nur sie können jetzt noch helfen und versuchen, zwanzig Leben zu retten. Dabei ahnen sie nichts von der unvorstellbaren Katastrophe, die sich hinter ihrem Rücken anbahnt - und die ihre Existenz grundlegend in Frage stellt.

Der Abschlussball der Lovecraft Highschool steht bevor - und mit ihm die legendäre Party, die jedes Jahr in der Höhle unter dem Keyhouse steigt. Es ist genau die Grotte, in der sich die höllische Tür zur Dämonenwelt befindet, die sich nur mit dem Omega-Schlüssel öffnen lässt. Doch glücklicherweise ist die Höhle geflutet und das Tor steht unerreichbar unter Wasser. Aber so schnell lässt sich der finstere Dämon nicht von seinen bösen Plänen abbringen: Er befiehlt den Schatten, die Höhle trockenzulegen. Währenddessen irrt der Geist Bodes ungesehen durch das Keyhouse.

Living and slaving in Fill City One, you get used to the smell. We call it the Everpresent Stink. But every once in a while, on a spring day with a breeze, it clears away enough to remind us that there is something more out there. Most Fillers' wildest dreams would be just to get past the walls and live in the mainland. But my dream? It’s a little bigger. I’m going to Mars.

Six months ago, the world ended. The Baugh Contagion swept across the planet. Its victims were left twitching, adrenalized cannibals that quickly became know as Junkies. Civilization crumbled as people created isolated safe havens to hide from the infected... and the possibly infected. Now, as society nears a tipping point, lives will intersect and intertwine across two days in a desolate city.

In Level Five, the debut near-future thriller by Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter, AIs battle for dominance, and nanotechnology is on the loose. And all that stands in the way of the coming apocalypse is a starry-eyed inventor who dreams of building a revolutionary new spacecraft and an intelligence agency desk jockey faced with the impossible choice of saving her daughter - or saving the world.

In Rip-Off!, 13 of today’s best and most honored writers of speculative fiction face a challenge even they would be hard-pressed to conceive: Pick your favorite opening line from a classic piece of fiction (or even non-fiction) - then use it as the first sentence of an entirely original short story.

Enfant, Chris Hooper rêvait souvent de monstres. Mais dans le fin fond de l'espace, il n'a trouvé que la solitude et l'isolement. Une fois arrivés sur la planète LV178, Hooper et ses compagnons de bord ont découvert une terrible tempête de sable, un véritable enfer... et de la trimonite, la matière la plus dure connue de l'homme. Quand une navette s'écrase dans le vaisseau spatial le Marion, les mineurs installés sur la planète apprennent qu'il y avait bien plus que de la trimonite au fond des cavernes.

The year is 2016. Not our 2016. Theirs. Earth is dying, the result of a worldwide nuclear holocaust caused by America’s dictatorial President-for-Life Lewis Henderson, a man who will use any means necessary to maintain power and survive. Enter: The Splitter. A machine capable of splitting off an exact replica of Henderson’s world. A world where the cataclysmic events causing its destruction have yet to occur. That world is ours.

Set in present-day Los Angeles, Junk explores an epic conspiracy, one at work for thousands of years that involves total takeover of the planet Earth by aliens. In the wild, souped-up vision of Les Bohem - the acclaimed, Emmy-winning writer of the Steven Spielberg miniseries, Taken - the world is at the end stage of long-range plot that involves a gigantic genetic-engineering project. The aliens who have invaded us have no planet. No spaceship is coming. Instead, a small advance force comes, breeds, and dies - thus becoming an anomaly in our DNA that can’t be explained.

It's Christmas in Half-Moon Hollow and newly turned vampire Iris Scanlon-Calix wants to make Gigi's first visit home from college as normal and special as possible. It's taken months for Iris to work up the nerve to spend time around her baby sister after her vampire transition, so she enlists help from Jane Jameson and Company to keep her blood-thirst under control and assure Gigi's safety. Gigi, on the other hand, has problems of her own, including the demise of her relationship with high school sweetheart, Ben, and a looming job interview with Ophelia Lambert, the scariest potential employer in the Hollow.