Search Results for: lost-and-found

Not so long ago Marcus Walker was just another young commodities trader in Chicago, working hard and playing harder. But that’s all in the past, part of a life half forgotten – a reality that vanished when he was attacked while camping and tossed aboard a starship bound for deep space.

Desperately, Walker searches for explanations, only to realise he’s trapped in a horrifying nightmare that is all too real. Instead of being a rich hotshot at the top of the food chain, Walker discovers he’s just another amusing novelty, part of a cargo of “cute” aliens from primitive planets – destined to be sold as pets to highly advanced populations in “civilized” regions of the galaxy.

Even if he weren’t constantly watched by his captors, Walker has few options. After all, there is no escape from a speeding starship. Another man might resign himself to the inevitable and hope to be sold to a kindly owner, but not Walker. This former college football star has plenty of American ingenuity and no intention of admitting defeat, now or ever. In fact, he’s only just begun to fight.

A wedding ring, a missing woman, a bizarre disappearance…

Brock and Poole have one of their most unusual cases to unravel

‘Devilishly engaging characters and authentic details of police operations’ Booklist

When Eunice Bailey takes her wedding ring to a London jeweller to have it enlarged, she is very keen for it to be done quickly. She is a reliable and favoured customer and when the jeweller is unable to get in touch with her to collect the ring, he contacts the police.

Detective Chief Inspector Brock and Detective Sergeant Poole are assigned to the case, and what begins as a fairly simple missing person enquiry develops into a mystery that has ramifications stretching as far as Bermuda . . .

Servius had always been a faithful servant of the goddess Diana. As a gladiator he had given her thanks for his victories, as a Centurion he had prayed to her on the eve of every battle. When at last the tide of war turned against him he fled to her sanctuary on the shore of Lake Nemi. Here he killed the Priest in order to become the Priest and ever after he lived in fear of being killed himself by the next aspirant for the office. When the fatal battle was fought the dying Servius had a vision of Diana, who made him a strange promise. He would die, yet he would not die. He would live, yet he would not live. When he found himself he would be lost, and when he was lost he would be found.

Servius closed his eyes by the shorts of Lake Nemi and opened them in a strange, frightening world where chariots ran without horses and where men flew inside iron birds. His first problem was to survive. His second was to find his way home!

First there was the end.



After weeks of running from pursuers, Gene and Stacy finally found refuge on an isolated island.



But around them the island changed – and so did they.



Each time they awoke from sleep, they lived a different life in a different time. And the farther back they went, the more they lost their anchor to their own world. When at last they were found, the people they had become no longer recognised their pursuers.



And that was the beginning.

The interstellar wormholes failed and silence fell across a third of the galaxy. And when Karl Woodward’s starship The Mountain found a lost colony, a stranded criminal mob struck, determined to seize his ship.

Atlantis, the legendary lost continent of wonders and marvels, has intrigued the mind of men for thousands of years. So when a daring young adventurer found a new clue to its actual whereabouts, he could not resist setting out to find it.

Ships occasionally disappeared in hyperspace, regrettable sacrifices to the luxury of faster than light travel. But now one of the lost ships has been found and the wreckage is enough to terrify even the most cold-blooded witness.

The lucky ones on the lost ship are dead. The others have been turned inside-out in gruesome parody of human beings and they are still alive. The disgraced Captain Kurt Varl is chosen to command a suicide mission to discover the cause of these disasters.

The enemy is unknown and the only way Varl can solve the mystery is to use himself as bait!

MARS: THE SKULL OF A PLANET PICKED CLEAN BY THE WIND OF TIME

North Beyond the desert of Meroe, past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharfs of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept into the unmapped waste called Umbra. It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had ridden and vanished-in a time beyond memory. It was here that the outworlder Ryker followed the golden-eyed Valarda and found the Child-of-Stars.

After huge gold deposits were found in Antarctica and gold became common, the world’s financial markets went into a tailspin and every currency lost its value. As bankers meet to find a solution they are approached by one Dr. Syx, who has an evil sneer and a source of a new, mysterious metal to replace gold – a metal which only he can produce.

It is up to two heroic engineers try to uncover the secret of this new metal…

He was suspended alone and unprotected in the sea of forgetfulness where Saturn looked brilliant against the sunless black of deep outer space.

It was like an elusive dream of a past only half-remembered, forever just out of reach amid the shifting galaxies of deep space. Somewhere out there he had lost his memory – space amnesia they called it. But they had found him and brought him back and given him a memory again.

But was it his memory?

The secret of the three kings – revealed at last

For centuries, interstellar prospectors had searched for the fabled Worlds of the Three Kings, the lost El Dorado of the galaxy. But if any found it, they were never heard from again. The mad cyborg Prophet, Ishmael Hand, discovered the mysterious system, with artefacts indicating a superhuman technology, and he had refused to reveal its location before vanishing forever in history.

Two more recent expeditions have found the Three Kings. A starfaring evangelist – Doctor Karl Woodward, preacher and leader of the starship The Mountain – followed a clue and found it, but never returned. Then a spacegoing salvage team followed Woodward’s trail, and also vanished.

Now a chance encounter between what’s left of the once-mighty human military with an inexplicable alien force has brought an armed expedition to the third planet of the Three Kings, Kaspar. They will join forces with the survivors of the first two expeditions, who have been marooned both by alien powers and by human treachery, as they at last encounter the alien minds behind the mysterious triple planetary system – and face a decision that may determine the fate of the entire human race!

BOOK TWO OF THE PERILOUS QUEST FOR LYONESSE

It is time for Simon Branthwaite to leave Sandarro, the city where he has lingered since reaching the fabled island of Roackall. Bidding a farewell to his new-found love, Princess Ilven, he sets out with Prince Avran to continue his quest for the lost realm of Lyonesse, heading toward the Stoney Mountains where many an adventure awaits them…

The Lords of Stoney Mountain is the second in Anthony Swithin’s fantastical Lyonesse sequence, edited by Mark Sebanc.

Over a dozen spaceships had disappeared into hyperspace, never to return. The lost vessels included the Jason, the Starbird, and the Invincible. Everyone assumed that they had fallen victim to some mechanical failure. But the mystery deepened when the Invincible was found drifting in space, six months after vanishing. The ship’s engines were undamaged, the hull intact – but there was no trace of any living thing aboard; living or dead. No trace of its crew or the two hundred passengers. The ship was deserted!

Something had happened to the ship, to the passengers and crew. Something in hyperspace – or somebody!

When Morgan Chane and his comrades of John Dilullo’s interstellar mercenaries invaded the Close World of Arkuu in search of a lost Terran expedition, they found a planet of strange menace. Incredibly powerful monsters prowled though Arkuu’s dense jungles, and the ghosts of the planet’s past haunted its ancient deserted cities. The Arkuuns themselves fought grimly to drive the Terrans away. But at last Chane discovered the Free-Faring, the terrible alien secret of Arkuu..and suddenly he knew why no Terran had left the Closed Worlds alive.

Originally written as a play and performed at the Mermaid Theatre, Easter 1962.

It is the early 20th century. Man is seeking signs of life elsewhere in the universe, but all exploratory ships have been lost without a trace – except for DSP15. Thirty years after leaving earth, and given up for lost, DSP15 suddenly appears on radar screens at the space station at Mildenhall, England. Her crew had been frozen to prevent ageing, and as the ship settles to a landing, Dr Richard Warboys eagerly awaits with other scientists for word of what DSP15 has found. But there is no crew, only a message scratched into a metal surface, signed by the captain: “If this ship returns to Earth, then mankind is in deadly peril – God help you – ” And so Earth becomes accidentally involved in a cosmic battle against a virtually omnipotent alien power, in a story suspenseful and exciting from cover to cover.

Geoffrey Hastings is doing very well for himself: having survived the Great War, he is not only working for wealthy financier Sir John Smethurst but is engaged to his daughter, Emily. Hastings has a rival for Emily’s affections in the form of Samuel McCorquodale, a successful businessman and both friend and rival of Sir John, and there is no love lost between the two men.

Then Sir John is found murdered, and suspicion falls on Hastings until an unexpected alibi sets him free.

But who did murder Sir John? Layer after layer of deception is peeled away until the shocking truth emerges . . .

PLANET OF SAND: A world literally bald, completely covered by sand and devoid of life – or so the stranded spaceman thought until he saw the huge menacing girders whose origin and purpose he could not begin to fathom.

WHITE SPOT: A gold locket containing a picture of a girl, found in millennia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of light-years from Earth, threatens the existence of the entire human race.

SECOND LANDING: A lost space team lands on a deserted planet, entirely unprepared for the strange world’s one citizen; a great white amoeboid monster, hiding in wait to wreak its fury on any intruders.

A rose-red city, half as old as time. Once it had been king city of a mighty empire and the center of the ancient faith – Gateway to the Gods, the old epics name it. Now it was dead, empty, deserted, only a dim ghost of its vanished splendor. Such was Ilionis. Lost city of Mars. A somber ruin, cold and lonely. But Ilionis was not forgotten. The old city held a valuable treasure. A treasure that brought Earthmen Ivo Tengren and scientist Keresny on a strange and difficult journey to the city’s gates. A journey that was now ended. Ilionis had been found. The treasure was close by. And now an even stranger journey was about to begin.

The dream of being a superman came true for Max Quest – and immediately turned into a nightmare.

He was not alone. There were Others with extraordinary powers, and the last thing they wanted was another superman on Earth – especially one working for good instead of evil.

They couldn’t kill him. But they could send him . . . elsewhere.

Elsewhere was the viciously hostile world of Qanar, where Max’s powers didn’t work and sorcery was a more potent weapon than science, where shadows were as menacing as steel. Max Quest still had to save Earth from the corrupt threat of the Others – but he found his destiny intricately linked with that of Qanar as well. And somewhere in space-time was his lost love . . .

AN ACCIDENT IN TIME…

Duncan Reid was snatched out of the twentieth century from a cruise liner in the mid-Pacific. Oleg Vladimirovitch came from Novgorod in medieval Russia. Udin was a Hun barbarian who lived by cunning and the axe. Erissa had been a sacred priestess in a lost continent. And a mistake in a time-experiment by a race from the far future had thrown these four unlikely comrades together, pulling them through a warp in the fabric of space and time to a world which was ancient history.

The strange alliance that Duncan and his comrades formed in that unfamiliar world was to take on a significance that none of them could have foreseen. For not only their own future, but they very future of the world they had found was at stake…

After years of beachcombing on the pleasure planet of Mulciber, ex-engineer Johnny Mantell thought he had hit rock bottom. But when he was unjustly accused of murder, he knew there was worse to come.

Johnny had to get out. And the only place for an outcast like himself was the impregnable outlaw world of Starhaven, a refuge that defied all galactic laws.

Once there, Johnny’s only wish was to forget the past and be left alone. But the super-science dictator of Starhaven had other plans for him. And soon Johnny found himself in the midst of one of the most explosive struggles the world had ever known. If he failed, not only his own life would be lost, but the future of galactic civilisation would be totally altered.

Edward Davis was a promising rookie in the Time Service. He had made jumps into the past – two, three, even six centuries – but nothing could prepare him for a leap of thirty-five centuries, all the way back to Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt.

In the blink of an eye, he found himself in a world of temples and tombs, pharaohs and pyramids, jackal-headed gods, mummies and talking beetles. In the ancient city of Thebes, Davis must rescue two members of the Service lost in time.

Taken in by a mysterious temple priestess and befriended by a beautiful Egyptian slave girl, Davis is sent to the City of the Dead to learn the trade of embalming. But as the hour of his scheduled return to his own time approaches, Edward Davis must come to grips with the truth behind the fate of his comrades – and the seductive allure of ancient Egypt.

BLINDING LIGHT, NOISE BEYOND SOUND – A JOURNEY INTO NOTHINGNESS…

Imperial Intelligence Agent Brion Bayard was catapulted into nothingness by an unknown force and woke to find himself in a universe not his own. Surrounded by hulking, cannibalistic ape men who called themselves Hagroon, Bayard was soon entrapped in a web of time lines. He found himself running from the Hagroon into the arms of Dzok, the educated monkey man of Xonijeel; transported by Dzok to a universe where Napoleon the Fifth was in power and left there to the tender powers of the beautiful witch Olivia; struggling with the bonds of a fictitious past, always striving to regain his lost universe of Zero-zero Stockholm so he could bring the warning which might save his world from sudden, violent death…

Life at the Station had ceased to hold any drama. The only enemies were boredom – a psychic inertia – and the innate weakness of the human element. Reading and samplings, data analysis and stereotyped daily radio reporting filed the long bleak hours.

Suddenly they lost all contact with the outside. No radio…No television…No physical contact with patrolling ships…Nothing… Their universe had contracted until life was bounded by the beryllium alloy fuselage of the Station.

Martia, the assistant astro-physicist, woke from a strangely deep sleep to find herself unable to get out of her cabin. None of the others could reach her… When the door was finally cut away Martia had vanished.

One by one other crew members and scientific personnel disappeared until Kersh, the radio-operator, found himself alone on the vast echoing station…