SET A TRAP FOR A SORCERER . . .
WITHOUT BEING TRAPPED YOURSELF!

Eric Banyon has settled into the New York whirl nicely: he's doing well at Juilliard, he's made a lot of new friends, he's defeated a lord of the Unseleighe Sidhe . . .

Or has he

Aerune mac Audelaine, whose beloved was killed by mortal men, was determined to destroy the human race until Eric, with a little help from his new friends the Guardians, thwarted Aerune's plans and exposed the chemists whose designer poison turned ordinary humans into zombie Mages. The human side of the threat is finished, but Aerune, like the rest of the Sidhe, has a long memory . . . and a lot of patience. He's also got Jeanette Campbell, former Threshold Black Ops, and the science behind the murder.

Can Eric stop Aerune's latest plan Only if he finds out about it before it's too late, but between babysitting a visiting Healer, training a banjo-playing Bard, attending his daughter's Underhill Naming ceremony, dealing with a dragon-and trying to survive summer school-Eric's got his hands full. Saving the world has never been more necessary-or come at a higher price.

THIS IS YOUR SOUL
ON DRUGS

After the events chronicled in Bedlam's Bard, world-saving bard and magician Eric Banyon moves into his new New York apartment hoping to settle down to the quiet life. No such luck: his building is a safe-house for a group of occultist Guardians protecting the city from supernatural evil. And there's a new evil for them to guard against....

When unethical drug researchers discover that they can induce amazing mental powers using psychotropic drugs, they begin planning to raise a drug-enslaved army of mercenaries and grow very, very rich. But this gets the attention of Aerune mac Audelaine, lord of the dark Unseleighe Sidney, who hopes to use the drugs to break through to the human world and feed on the suffering there. Both plans will bring terror to the world-and both are threatened by the very existence of Eric Banyan.

With his possibly loyal companions-a beautiful elven half-breed and a gargoyleEric heads for a three-way battle of wizardry that will determine Gotham's fate-and his own.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mercedes Lackey, author of the bestselling Heralds of Valdemar and Bardic Voices series, began life as a child and has been attempting to rectify that error ever since. Named for actress Mercedes McCambridge, she has been trying with no success to get the Benz automobile authorities to recognize the natural link between her name and theirs, and offer her the use of an M100 or some variety of high-end sports car for gratis. This, too, has had a distinct lack of success. Other than writing she can be found at various times prying the talons of the birds of prey she is attempting to nurse back to health out of her hands, endangering her vision by creating various forms of Art Beadwork, and cross-stitching dragons, gryphons, and other semi-mythological fauna. At the moment, her hair is red, her favorite color is green, and she is covered by various members of her flock of pet parrots, cockatoos and macaws, all of which are trying to help her type8shgalal-akejbejks9ife.

Rosemary Edghill, after holding the usual array of Weird Writer Jobs, including freelance graphic designer and vampire killer, settled down to a career as a full-time writer. She has written three books in the Twelve Treasures series, urban fantasies about elves and subways, as well as books in genres ranging from romance to mystery. She has also collaborated with such masters of fantasy as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andre Norton. Of this collaboration, Mercedes Lackey writes, "I needed a new partner for our Bedlam Bards series ... Rosemary was the only possible writer who was sharp enough!" Her web page can be found at http://www.sff.net/people/eluki

THE CLONED STRANGERS

Not everyone would envy young Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, even though he had formed his own mercenary fleet before attending the naval academy, and even though his mother was the beautiful Cordelia, the ship captain who has taught the Lords of Barrayar much about the perils of sexism. Even the fact that Miles is third in line to the throne and personally owns a major chunk of his home planet would not tempt any normal person to change places with him.

When assassins came to rid the world of his father, his mother, pregnant with Miles, was in the line of fire, and Miles was but an egg for the omelet in an all too literal sense. Thanks to heroic medical intervention, Miles survived his near fatal brush with war gas-as a pain-filled dwarf with bones as weak and brittle as some malign composite of chalk and glass. Miles is often mistaken for a mutant by his mutant loathing countrymen.

But there is one who does envy him, who wants to be him: his brother, his cloned stranger formed from tissue stolen from Miles when he was a child. For Mark Vorkosigan was created and raised up for only one purpose: to become Miles, to murder and replace him. In Brothers in Arms that conspiracy was routed and Mark made more or less compliant to his new Miles-less fate. But in the intervening years Mark has learned that without Miles he is . . . nothing. The new and better Mark doesn't really want to kill his brother, but still it may come to that: Mark to stay, Miles to go. . . .

Accident or Treachery

Komarr could be a garden-with a thousand more years work. or an uninhabitable wasteland, if the terraforming fails. Now the solar mirror vital to the terraforming of the conquered planet has been shattered by a ship hurtling off course. The Emperor of Barrayar sends his newest Imperial Auditor, Lord Miles Vorkosigan, to find out why.

The choice is not a popular one on Komarr, where a betrayal a generation before drenched the name of Vorkosigan in blood. In the political and physical claustrophobia of the domed cities, are the Komarrans surrounding Miles loyal subjects, potential hostages, innocent victims, or rebels bidding for revenge

Lies within lies, treachery within treachery-Miles is caught in a race against time to stop a plot that could exile him from Barrayar forever. His burning hope lies in an unexpected ally, one with wounds as deep and honor as beleaguered as his own.

THEY'RE SWARMING FOR THE KILL . . . 
AND WE ARE THE PREY!

Everybody knows how despicable the alien Fibians are. Allies of the fanatic Mollie rebels against the human Commonwealth, they show no mercy, they have no remorse, and they find human flesh delectable—at least when served live. Fielding a gigantic starfleet against Earth and its colonies, they march like the giant spiders they resemble through humanity's nightmares, and soon they will march across its devastated worlds.

When the captain of the starship Invincible is incapacitated after a Fibian attack, only Peter Raeder—former fighter pilot, starship flight engineer, and unorthodox hero of the war against the Mollies—can be entrusted with command of the ship. His mission: to track down the alien raiders who took out his captain, and then to start hitting the enemy behind the lines.

It's a suicide mission, and Raeder knows it . . . until the fortunes of battle drive him deeper into alien space than he'd ever intended to go, the Invincible too damaged ever to return home. There he discovers that the monstrous Fibians may not be monsters after all . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

James Doohan was an engineer, and later a captain of artillery in the Canadian Army and was wounded on D-Day. He "sat out" the rest of the war flying reconnaissance over enemy lines. After the war, he taught and practiced acting, appearing in over 4,000 radio and TV programs, as well as films and Shakespearean production. When his friend Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, he wrote the part of Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer of the Enterprise, to fit Doohan's real-life persona. Doohan stepped into the tailor-made role of "Scotty," and the rest is history. Now his career takes a new turn with this fast-moving adventure series conceived by Doohan as a science fiction expansion of his personal career as an engineer and pilot in World War II.

S.M. Stirling is the coauthor, with Anne McCaffrey, of the #1 genre bestseller, The City Who Fought. With David Drake, he is the author of "The General" novels, a popular military SF series. Stirling has also done the top-selling military SF collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta, and is the author of the highly successful "Draka" alternate history trilogy recently published by Baen in one volume as The Domination. He has recently edited a shared-universe volume set in the same universe, Drakas!

Introducing
Flight Engineer Peter Raeder.
The man who is "Scotty" now creates
a blockbuster science fiction
adventure series!

Peter Raeder became the Commonwealth's first ace pilot in the war against the secessionist Mollies. That battle cost him his hand-and his right to fly the nimble Speeds that had been his first love. Now he's Flight Engineer on the fast carrier Invincible, a crack new ship with a picked crew, ready to fight the Mollies who control the universe's richest anti-hydrogen mines, and the loathsome spider-like alien Fibians who have come to their aid.

There are only a few problems. The pirate raiders who attack the convoy taking him to his new posting, for one. And closer to home, the traitor onboard the Invincible who engineered the grisly death of Peter's predecessor, and who'll kill the entire crew unless Peter can stop him....