Fueled by the Soul. Commanded by the Dead.

In an empire ruled by the honored dead, seraphs are the ultimate weapons. Fueled by the pilot’s very soul, these colossal humanoid mecha are unstoppable in battle.

Jack Donolon is the most powerful pilot in existence, a hero of Earth with a mind fractured by his seraph. On the far side of the galaxy, he uncovers a terrible truth about the seraphs and their pilots. Now he must return on a mission no one will understand, to face and kill the people who once called him friend and comrade.

But the death he will bring is insignificant next to the destruction that will follow, should he fail . . .

From national best-selling author Jacob Holo comes an action-packed read for fans of Gundam, Evangelion, Pacific Rim, and anyone who's ever wanted to pilot a giant robot!

Start the adventure today!

Fueled by the Soul. Hunted by the Dead.

An action-packed read for fans of Gundam, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pacific Rim, and other kick-butt giant robot adventures!

In an empire ruled by the honored dead, seraphs are the ultimate weapons. Fueled by the pilot's very soul, these colossal humanoid war machines are unstoppable in battle. Only a few possess the gift to control such craft, and those men and women are prized above all others.

Seth Elexen and a small group of elite pilots have tracked the renegade Veketon to the far side of the galaxy. With only one ship and a single squadron of seraphs, they alone must face the tyrant within the heart of his growing power.

But Veketon is no easy mark. Through perverse sciences, he has been reborn as a pilot of terrifying power, and Quennin S’Kev, a woman Seth abandoned for all the wrong reasons, stands by his side and will defend him to the death.

Now Seth has one final desperate chance at success, but in order to get to Veketon, he must be willing to kill the only woman he has ever loved.

In January of 2011 we started posting free short stories we thought might be of interest to Baen readers. The first stories were "Space Hero" by Patrick Lundrigan, the winner of the 2010 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest, and "Tanya, Princess of Elves," by Larry Correia, author of Monster Hunter International and set in that universe. As new stories are made available, they will be posted on the main page, then added to this book (to save the Baen Barflies the trouble of doing it themselves). This is our compilation of short stories for 2020.

As is usual with such copyrighted material from Baen, the contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold. All commercial rights are reserved to Baen Books.

The Red Sea by Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin
Adrift by Frank Chadwick
The Policeman's Daughter by Wil McCarthy
Peregoy's Wolves by Nancy Kress
Chasing Your Tail by Peter J. Wacks
Bagala Devi Objective by M.T. Reiten
Sacrifices by D.J. Butler
Humanslayer by G. Scott Huggins
The Hero Business by Tim Akers
At the Seams by Jacob Holo
The Red Ship by Marc Miller
Preferred Seating by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

In January of 2011 we started posting free short stories we thought might be of interest to Baen readers. The first stories were "Space Hero" by Patrick Lundrigan, the winner of the 2010 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest, and "Tanya, Princess of Elves," by Larry Correia, author of Monster Hunter International and set in that universe. As new stories are made available, they will be posted on the main page, then added to this book (to save the Baen Barflies the trouble of doing it themselves). This is our compilation of short stories for 2022.

As is usual with such copyrighted material from Baen, the contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold. All commercial rights are reserved to Baen Books.

Flops by Michael Mersault
The Barcadian Wild by Tim Akers
Monsters in Our Midst by Wen Spencer
Window on Samovar by D.J. Butler
See the Fairville Oddity! by David Afsharirad
Man on the Moon by Elaine Midcoh
Trouble Is My Business by Mike Kupari
Dark Angel by David Carrico
On Cultivating a Chosen One by Christopher Baxter
The Bloody Dentist by Jacob Holo
Fire-breathing Dragon by Dan Koboldt
Xmas at ESL1 by Wil McCarthy

All he wanted was a simple job to make ends meet. What he got was a mysterious cat girl, a shot at a hoard of treasure, and a whole lot of trouble.

The Solar System ain’t what it used to be!

In the far distant future, Saturn’s rings are gone, Mercury is a gas giant, and Earth is remembered only as a unit of measure. Nearly godlike AIs reshaped the Solar System in eons past, but they too are now nothing more than a fading memory.

Captain Nathaniel Kade cares for none of that. He’s but a simple freelancer from the orbital ring of Neptune, struggling to make ends meet and to keep his understaffed spaceship from falling apart. All he wants is a decent, uneventful job to help put his finances back in order.

What he receives instead is Vessani S’Kaari, a mysterious and beautiful cat girl who tried—and failed—to steal a ship belonging to a band of space pirates. Vessani’s in over her head and is clearly more trouble than she’s worth, but she also has a lead on what may be the greatest treasure trove of lost technology the Solar System has ever seen.

Nathan pulls her butt out of the fire, and together they begin to assemble a team to seek out this long-lost bounty. But other interested parties have their eyes on the same prize; the Jovian Everlife has dispatched a fleet of warships with one of their elite, many-bodied agents in command, and he’d like a few words with Nathan and his new crewmember.

The Gordian Protocol

by David Weber and Jacob Holo

The Valkyrie Protocol

by David Weber and Jacob Holo

The Janus File

by David Weber and Jacob Holo

The Weltall File

by David Weber and Jacob Holo

The Dyson File

by Jacob Holo

Two worlds at war. Two brothers at war.

With advanced weaponry and impenetrable armor, the Crusaders smash aside anything that stands in their way. Led by Kaneda Kusanagi, they have only one mission: to destroy Matriarch, the last thinking machine, and free the people of Jupiter from her tyranny.

Whether they like it or not.

Standing in their way are the Dragons, led by Kaneda’s estranged brother Ryu. With super-human reflexes and invisible battle suits, the Dragons are masters of infiltration and sabotage. Loyal only to Matriarch, they will stop at nothing to protect their way of life.

The two brothers are set to collide in a battle that will shake the great powers of the solar system and force both men to question what they believe in.

From national bestselling author Jacob Holo comes a world of space marines, space ninjas, artificial intelligence, and lots of explosions for fans of Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein) and Armor (John Steakley).

Start the adventure today!

NEW GORDIAN DIVISION NOVEL: When a top engineer on Saturn commits suicide, Detective Isaac Cho and Special Agent Susan Cantrell are called in to review the case. But what seems like an open-and-shut case spirals into the strange. And if Cho and Cantrell don't solve the mystery soon, they may be the next ones to wind up dead.

The Atlas Corporation was all set to tear apart the planet Mercury—converting its resources into a swarm of solar-collecting megastructures—when Esteban Velasco, lead Atlas engineer, is found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Detective Isaac Cho and Special Agent Susan Cantrell, both eager to return to active duty despite close calls on their last case, are sent in to assess the situation. Their superiors expect a simple declaration of suicide, but Velasco’s death proves anything but typical.

The detectives soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery far more complex—and strange—than anyone expected, leading them to a church for Mercury-loving weirdos, a “nudist” colony open to Saturn’s unbreathable atmosphere, an exclusive park for hunting dinosaurs, and a ghost town where forgotten machines wage war over condo floorplans.

What was meant to be an easy return to duty for the detectives takes a sudden dark turn when ruthless mind-hackers ambush and nearly kill them, making one fact crystal clear:

If they don’t solve this case soon, it’ll be their corpses that turn up next.

NEW STANDALONE NOVEL FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE HONOR HARRINGTON SERIES, DAVID WEBER

A Man of Two Worlds

Dr. Benjamin Schröder was far from a man of action. In fact, he was a history teacher—Chairman of the Castle Rock University history department—and if his life wasn't perfect, it was close. Until, that is the discussion of his star student Elzbietá Abramowski's dissertation on Operation Oz, the Pacific Allies' invasion of Vladivostok, staged through occupied Japan to meet their Imperial German allies, was brutally interrupted.

The psychotic episode that turned his entire world upside down struck with absolutely no warning, and it was more terrifying than anything he should have been able to imagine, leaving him with a complete, incredibly detailed set of false, nightmare "memories." Not just of his own life, but of an entire, ghastly world in which Operation Oz had never happened. In which millions of helpless civilians had been systematically slaughtered in "extermination camps" that were horrific beyond belief. In which there was still a Soviet Union. In which the Chinese Communists had succeeded, the Korean Peninsula had been permanently divided, thousands of nuclear warheads had spread their deadly threat across the entire Earth, and the Middle East was a festering sore of bloodshed, fanaticism, and terrorism.

The knowledge that those false memories had come from somewhere inside his own psyche was terrible, but with the help of Commander Abramowski, a highly decorated Navy fighter pilot who’d been forced to deal with her own PTSD after crippling combat wounds invalided her out of service, he’s put his life back together. With Elzbietá's support, he's learned to deal with the nightmares, to recognize that they are only nightmares that can't—and won't—be permitted to rule his life.

Until, that is, a lunatic named Raibert Kaminski knocks on his door one afternoon with an impossible and horrifying story about alternate realities, time travel, temporal knots, and more than a dozen doomed universes which must inevitably die if the temporal storm front rushing towards the distant future isn't stopped. He has to be lying, of course. Or completely insane. But what if he's not a madman after all? What if he's actually telling the truth?

That possibility is the most terrifying thing of all. Because if he is, the false memories aren't false after all, and that other world is just as real as the one Schröder has always known. And if that's true, Benjamin Schröder is about to become the greatest mass murderer in human history, because he has to choose. Whether he acts or refuses to act, Benjamin Schröder is the one man who will decide which universe lives and which dies, along with every star system, every galaxy—and every single human being—in it.

Including the woman he's discovered he loves more than life itself.

THE FATES OF UNIVERSES AREN’T THE ONLY THINGS TIME TRAVEL CAN IMPACT

It was supposed to be a routine trip for the members of the Gordian Division, both human and AI: fly out to Saturn, inspect the construction of their latest time machines, then fly back.

But when the division’s top scientist and chief engineer are killed in the same freak accident, suspicions of foul play run deep. Detective Isaac Cho is sent in to investigate, but he has more on his mind than just a new case. His superiors have saddled him with an exchange officer from the neighboring Admin—Special Agent Susan Cantrell—whose notion of proper “law enforcement” involves blowing up criminals first and skipping questions entirely.

Despite his objections, Cho is stuck with an untested partner on a case that increasingly reeks of murder and conspiracy. The unlikely pair must work together to unravel this mystery, and soon they discover their unique combination of skills might just provide the edge they need.

But nothing is ever simple where the Gordian Division is involved.

Not even time itself.

NEW NOVEL IN THE BEST-SELLING GORDIAN DIVISION SERIES FROM NYT BEST-SELLING AUTHOR DAVID WEBER AND JACOB HOLO

After an industrial ship carrying advanced self-replicating machines explodes on its way to Mercury, analysis of the wreckage reveals it to be forty years too old. Raibert Kaminski, the Gordian Division’s top agent, and his crew on the TransTemporal Vehicle Kleio soon discover the ship was transported to an uncharted universe, one with temporarily accelerated time. Forty years passed for the ship’s industrial machines while everyone else experienced only a few short days. Raibert is certain a powerful weapon of some nature has been built out in the unexplored reaches of the multiverse, but where and by whom remains unknown.

The search is on, and the Gordian Division musters its fleet of time machines at Providence, a massive transdimensional station under construction. They call upon their allies from the militaristic Admin for aid in their search—but before plans can be formalized, the leader of the Admin’s Department of Temporal Investigation is murdered while visiting Providence, and the joint operation is thrown into chaos.

Accusations fly and tensions mount between the two organizations. Detectives Isaac Cho and Susan Cantrell—both fast becoming experts in transdimensional crime—are dispatched to Providence. But the clock is ticking for the detectives and Raibert’s crew. A vast, powerful conspiracy has shuddered into motion, and the two teams may be all that stand between it and destruction on a universal scale.

UNTANGLE THE PAST TO SAVE THE FUTURE. A NEW NOVEL IN THE WORLD OF THE BEST-SELLING THE GORDIAN PROTOCOL

TIME IS RUNNING OUT

Agent Raibert Kaminski and the crew of the Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio have made a shocking discovery out in the unknown reaches of the multiverse. They've stumbled across a temporal implosion that has claimed two whole universes, and neither Raibert nor his crew can figure out what caused this calamity other than it had something to do with reckless time travel.

The Kleio speeds back to their home universe of SysGov with this dire report, but an audacious plan is put into effect before they arrive. Old colleagues of Raibert's from the Antiquities Rescue Trust, together with a version of Samuel Pepys transplanted from the 17th century into the 30th, have proposed an expedition into the past. Their goal? To branch the timeline by preventing the Plague of Justinian, one of the worst pandemics in human history.

Meanwhile, SysGov's multiverse neighbor, the xenophobic Admin, is stirring. While their ambassadors put on a friendly show, the Admin is amassing a fleet of advanced, heavily armed time machines with SysGov firmly in the crosshairs.

Time is running out for Raibert and his team. But the crew of the Kleio won't go down without a fight, no matter where—or when—the threat to their home comes from.

COME FOR THE GAMES. STAY FOR THE MURDER.

A mystery in the Gordian Division universe.

The Weltall Tournament’s professional VR games were supposed to be a symbol of cooperation between SysGov and its militaristic neighbor, the Admin. But that was before star Admin player Elly Sako received a death threat, written in blood next to a copy of her own severed head. The Admin’s Department of Temporal Investigation swiftly seizes control of the crime scene, and the tournament transforms into a flashpoint of charged politics and conflicting jurisdictions.

SysPol Detective Isaac Cho and DTI Special Agent Susan Cantrell—partners in the officer exchange program—are sent in to take charge of the investigation and bring the situation under control. But solving this mystery won’t be easy, and the pair struggles to determine who is telling the truth. A jilted relationship between players soon explodes into signs of a far-reaching conspiracy, and the two detectives find themselves racing against time before the tournament ends.

Because the killer will be the only one who wins, should they fail.

Fueled by the Soul. Exiled by the Dead.

In an empire ruled by the honored dead, seraphs are the ultimate weapons. Fueled by the pilots' very souls, these colossal humanoid mecha are unstoppable in battle.

Quennin S’Kev was a seraph pilot before injuries scorched her mind and stripped her abilities. Exiled by her people for reasons she does not understand, she lives on without honor or purpose. It is an existence so repulsive to her that she openly considers ending her own life.

All that changes when enemy commandos kidnap Quennin and bring her before the renegade Veketon. He claims he can restore her talents, even make them stronger, and offers her a place in his army worthy of her skills. It is everything her heart secretly desires.

His price?

She must swear allegiance to the worst traitor her people have ever known.

From national best-selling author Jacob Holo comes a fun, fast-paced read for anyone who's ever wanted to pilot a giant robot.

Continue the adventure today!

The universe is a hamburger.

That’s what sixteen-year-old Nicole Taylor learns when a mysterious time-bending stranger saves her from a rampaging cyborg centipede.

See, the top bun? That’s our dimension. The bottom bun? That’s the monster’s dimension. And the patty? That’s a dimension where the two worlds meet – and the Reavers can attack.

The Reavers are horrific cybernetic killing machines, and their plans for the top bun? Well, they’re as terrifying as you’d expect.

But Nicole isn’t helpless. She has a rare gift. She can bend time around her and even stop it completely.

Plagued with nightmares and ambushed by monsters at every turn, Nicole has one chance to stop the Reavers’ genocidal invasion. With help from a chain-smoking pyromaniac, a neurotic sword-wielding assassin, and an icy goth chick with a crossbow, she’ll make a stand against the evil bugs.

Because if the universe is a hamburger, the Reavers want a bite.

From national best-selling author Jacob Holo comes a world of super powered teens, time manipulating cyborgs, and nonstop high-stakes action for fans of Renegades (Marissa Meyer), Steelheart (Brandon Sanderson), and Zeroes (Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, Deborah Biancotti).