Aeon's Legacy Series

In the late 21st Century, with Earth wracked by climate change and political upheaval, an ambitious private foundation launches a starship to find a new world. Among those aboard Aeon are Catharin Gault, an idealistic astronaut-physician, and scientist-passenger Joseph Devreze, a molecular biologist as brilliant as he is irresponsible. He has his own hidden motives for fleeing old Earth. Things begin to go amiss while everyone is still in the cold suspended animation called cryostasis, on the long journey through interstellar space. Programmed to search for a planet with a large moon—the only way to guarantee stable seasons, tides and an Earthlike ecosystem after terraforming—the starship finds a destination better than Catharin ever dared hope for: two Earth-sized planets locked in orbit around each other. Planet Green has abundant plant life and a puzzling lack of large animals. Planet Blue is an oceanic world covered with hurricanes. The green planet with its bright blue moon seems like a perfect stage for the drama of civilization to begin anew and turn out better this time. But the journey took far longer than anyone anticipated, and a millennium of cryostasis exacted a heavy price: insidious molecular damage. Now Catharin must rely on the untrustworthy maverick Joseph Devreze to help her save humankind on Planet Green. Their mutual attraction ratchets up even as their conflict escalates. Together Catharin and Joe must decide how they can face, and embrace, a future at odds with Aeon’s planned mission and their own expectations. Meanwhile the mystery of the Hurricane Moon looms over them all. And so the season of crisis begins. (130,000 words)

This is a sequel to the novel Hurricane Moon. At the outset of that book, Earth was wracked by climate change and political upheaval. An ambitious private foundation launched a starship to find a new world.  The starship Aeon sought a planet with a large moon to ensure Earthlike tides and seasons.  Aeon finally found a new world with an apparently primitive ecosystem and a huge ocean moon covered with hurricanes. But the human genome had been insidiously damaged by the cryostasis— cold suspended animation—that went on too long. Astronaut-physician Catharin Gault and molecular biologist Joseph Devreze had to learn how to repair the genome for there to be any human future on Planet Green. Soon they and everyone else collided with their highest hopes and worst fears—and, in some cases, with the past they thought they’d left behind on Earth.  Downfall Tide begins twenty-four years after the events in Hurricane Moon. Much has changed, thanks to unremitting hard work by the Catharin and Joe and the others in the first generation of explorers and colonists. They’ve founded a new civilization on Planet Green. They’ve begun to understand Green’s deceptively simple-looking ecosystem. To better understand the huge blue moon and the rest of the solar system, the starship Aeon is taking its last journey of exploration, to the outer planets.  And then a brilliant, strange new star appears in the evening sky of Planet Green.  It signals the beginning’s end.  

This is a sequel to two earlier books, Hurricane Moon and Downfall Tide. The final journey of the starship Aeon has reached yet another world—a hopeful new beginning after the disastrous events in Downfall Tide. The first generation of colonists from Earth either perished or had to be left behind. Now their children encounter wonders and terrors, monstrous aliens and marvelous allies, in a place stranger than anything they ever imagined. It's like a Bermuda Triangle in space . . . half as old as time. But even here, faith and hope endure, and love is stronger than death.3

Hidden inside the Starcross Nebula is a place of interstellar shipwreck. It's like a Bermuda Triangle half as old as time. It harbors malicious monsters and dangerous mysteries. It's a hell of a place to attempt a rescue mission. Captain Zilka Devreze and her crew on the starship Guardian Angel must race against time to find shipwreck survivors in mortal danger. They'll use Zilka's genius grasp of the intricacies of fast starflight to get in and back out again.   Mission specialist Jack Mistry was an accident investigator in the Solar System in his previous life. Abruptly revived from stasis in the starship Aeon, he agrees to join the unprecedented mission. When he fled from Earth on Aeon, what he expected to find on the other side of the stars wasn't an interstellar accident scene like this. Or a woman like Zilka. Always as singularly alone as brilliant, Zilka discovers that this can change. But first she has to learn how to lead a very assorted crew. And Jack has to learn to follow his heart. Soon all of them will discover how death and life, hell and hope, and danger and love intersect in the Starcross Nebula.

This story first appeared in the 2016 science fiction romance anthology Pets in Space. When frantic preparations for an unprecedented deep-space rescue mission are threatened by sabotage, the young roboticist Ten Jaxdown has to deploy and possibly sacrifice the swarm of investigative robots he invented and cares for more than anything else. But the intrepid young electrical engineer Anastasia Steed has an idea to improve the odds. These two learn that a pet can even be from space—yet humanize the space between two hurting and alienated human beings.