Embark on a flight of discovery with ten stories from the fertile mind of M.E Owen, including:A group of extraterrestrials finds an exciting new venue for date night—Earth.A Seattle bar houses a clandestine interplanetary waystation nicknamed the "Vortex of Hell."An alien discovers that the small child of the powerful human she was sent to observe may hold the key to initiating peaceful relations.A generation ship's engineer wakes up as a clone o...

Non Plus Ultra is the first story in M.E Owen's exciting new Zion Station series.Old, poorly maintained, and sliding into decrepitude, Zion Station orbits a gas giant in a backwater of human space. Originally purposed for scientific research, and then as support for the methane mining industry, its scientists are long gone, and its transfer pods have been decommissioned.Police Chief Pilar Jones y Garcia has enough on her plate dealing with rowdy gas miners on shore...

This prequel story to Survival Instincts finds Daniel Bennett serving hard time on the Holt penal station. Outed as a former cop, he doesn't stand a chance. His survival requires that he give up who he is - a good cop and honorable man - and become even more ruthless than the dregs of humanity that surround him. Instead, he attempts a precarious balancing act between Bennett the cop and Bennett the convict. But when an asteroid mining accident leaves him and two convicts adrift and short o...

Old, poorly maintained, and sliding into decrepitude, Zion Station orbits a gas giant planet in a backwater of human space. Originally purposed for scientific research, its scientists are long gone, leaving dusty closed-off sections of the station behind. These days it supports the methane mining industry for the planet below.But Zion has secrets. Big secrets. The type of secrets that may just topple an oppressive, genocidal empire.Police Chief Pilar Jones y Garcia knows th...

Four peaceful alien dirigibles, living in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant Galtus, find themselves sucked into a flying metal behemoth and left to starve.Max, stripped-down copy of Zion Station's rogue AI, temporarily installed in the ghost ship Suyash, discovers the two surviving aliens in the ship's gas pod. Given command of the ship by Police Chief Jones, he's tasked with returning the dirigibles home without detection and then forging a partnership with their cult...

Pilar Jones y Garcia, Zion Station's police chief, still mourns her husband's death years later. She, and everyone else with a radio, heard his last transmission moments before his small ship incinerated in the toxic atmosphere of the gas giant below.But Emilio Garcia y Jones had secrets that he kept even from the woman he adored. Secrets that hunted him down, forcing him to make the hardest decision of his life.Join us for a story set before the Consortium's AI genocide, w...

Zion Station. Decrepit, nearly forgotten on the edge of human space, and harboring a secret that could shift the course of humanity.Eight months ago, the Earth-based Consortium committed genocide against the AIs, destroying thousands of sentient beings, along with hundreds of thousands with the potential.Only six humans know that Zion Station's sentient AI, Max, survived the purge.Even as they rush to complete Max's move from the Consortium-built neural network to Z...

Forced to take a vacation, Zion Police Chief Pilar Jones y Garcia joins Skip and his Far Trails crew on what she thinks is a random cargo run. Grumpy and short-tempered on the second anniversary of Garcia's death, she just wants to be left alone. Instead, she finds herself on a ship full of idealistic hippies, who are traveling to a hidden ecological preserve planet.But sabotage on the ship and a murder on the colony derail Jones's hope of an uneventful vacation. And as sh...

A docked cargo ship run by an autonomous, non-sentient AI refuses admittance and instead threatens an attack against Zion's neural net.Police Chief Pilar Jones y Garcia, Far Trails' navigator/muscle Cray Solnik, and tech goddess Selma Zarvos, along with a cloned copy of Max—Zion's rogue AI—must find a way aboard, stop the shipboard AI, and figure out what the seventeen thousand not-quite-human life signatures in the holds are.They discover that the stakes for Zion ...

This third volume of Zion Station stories brings us old friends and new, human and not. The newly born and the unfathomably ancient.Alien cultures found, lost, and saved. Engineering wonders big and small.Ships and stations, pirates and sabotage, danger and bloodshed. Life-changing decisions against a backdrop of uncertainty.Relationships rekindled, new, and fraying.And secrets. From the highly personal to the far-reaching secrets that could take down a geno...

A mysterious distress signal sends Zion Station police chief Pilar Jones y Garcia, along with the crew of the Far Trails and a downsized copy of Zion's rogue AI Max, four billion kilometers away to the system's ship graveyard.The signal originates from the Suyash, a state-of-the-art gas mining ship that mysteriously disappeared four years ago, presumed lost with all hands in Galtus's tumultuous atmosphere. And now just as mysteriously reappeared in the graveyard.

Zion Station. Slowly decaying in a backwater of human space, now only useful as support for the methane mining industry that operates in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet below.But Zion harbors secrets that could topple the Consortium, Earth's oppressive, genocidal empire.Zion's saga continues, as Police Chief Pilar Jones y Garcia and her friends continue to protect those secrets with their lives and work toward bringing down the Consortium.The stories within b...