Don't forget!
You can now get the whole NARC series
as eBooks, formatted to suit every
machine from desk- to lap- to
palmtop. If
eBooks are the answer to your prayer,
click here!
Don't forget!
You can now get the whole NARC series
as eBooks, formatted to suit every
machine from desk- to lap- to
palmtop. If
gay science fiction in the eBook format is the answer to your prayer,
click here!
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Four centuries from now, humans have colonized scores of worlds, and are
still in the process of
terraforming and populating them with the untold, unwanted millions
of Earth's people. These colony worlds opened up new vistas of opportunity
... for the criminal cartels as well as the law-abiding.
It is an age of technlogy on a grand scale. Ships the size of cities, artificial
intelligences — and designer drugs which have never been imagined
in mankind's long history of experiment with rare, precious substances.
All the "traditional" drugs of the last several centuries have been
rendered harmless and therefore legal. The "blockers" are as cheap as
the drugs, and are sold legally, often in the same pack.
There are other substances which are far from recommended, chemicals liks
'gryphon' and 'chimera' and 'Buran.' These are certainly brain-rotters,
but even they have their blockers and are legal in some colonies, where
the population is judged affluent enough to afford both the Buran and the
blocker. In poorer colonies, Buran is rightly banned.
But in every colony, one drug remains utterly illegal.
This chemical is different. There is no blocker, no "cure" ... and the
first dose is lethally addictive. One rash act, one inebriated mistake
— or an act of spite on the part of a rival — and the user is
on a one way trip.
The drug is known as Angel.
It's a bitter, golden powder that has built
empires and torn them down, across the exotic colony worlds of the
Twenty Fourth Century. The "Angel empires" are the drug syndicates ...
Equinox, Black Unicorn, Death's Head, Scorpio, Aphelion.
In the more distant colonies, weeks' flight time away from the homeworlds,
their rule exceeds the power of government. And the siren-song
of Angel, the most seductive "exotic" ever designed, lures ever more
humans, endangering whole generations.
It is fifty years since Angel first appeared from a lab somewhere in the
Cygnus colonies. The rot began sowly.
Fifteen years later, its threat
was monstrous enough for the governments of Earth and the colonial worlds
to meet at the conference table in an effort to develop measures to stem
the tide.
A proposal was made and implemented, and a new department was born ...
a paramilitary department, quite separate from Starfleet, Army and Tactical.
NARCOTICS AND RIOT CONTROL (NARC) was designed,
chartered, and equipped, to take the new drug-war to the front lines. Their
battlefield is deep space, raw new colonies and rancid old ones, where high
technology has placed the Angel empires outside the law and beyond the
reach of Tactical Response (which shortens to Tactical or Tac).
In DEATH'S HEAD and EQUINOX, we learn how Tactical operates, when NARC
works alongside them in the cities of Chell and Elysium.
In the third book, SCORPIO,
we learn more about the early days of NARC, how the department was set
up, who was involved, and their first 'pivotal' syndicate bust, which
took place in the Jupiter system, at a time when the government of
Earth did not actually trust NARC to deploy in the homeworlds.
Get an overview of all five books,
see the publishing history and the 2008 covers!
The goverment still does not want NARC carriers in the homeworlds, nor
NARC gunships in the skies of Earth, Mars and the fantastic skycities of
the Jupiter system.
But NARC is there ... because Angel is there. And in Aphelion, the carrier
NARC-Athena returns to the homeworlds for the first time in her
operational career. Captain Kevin Jarrat and Captain Jerry Stone, and their
crew of paramilitary and civilian specialists, have followed a datatrail
that leads from the far-flung colony of Aurora, right back to the cities
of Chryse and Marsport ... Chicago and London.
To learn more, Meet Jarrat and Stone
themselves, the central characters of these novels, caught up in the
turmoil of their times, and connected by an empathic "bond" which has
changed their lives
. The bond can't be measured with any technology known,
but the two men can communicate over great distances, and in hazardous
conditions. The empathy is a side-effect of the treatment that bought back
Stone's life.
A NARC captain, strung out on Angel, with days left to live ...?
A NARC captain, buying Angel for him, in citybottom ...? And a man called Harry
Del who is much more than a surgeon. He's an empathic 'healer,' almost an
outcast in his own community. But it's Harry who has the key to the Stone's
survival, and he might have stumbled over the secret to the end of the Angel plague.
Meet the Characters too, and become immersed
in this amazing universe, with around 40% of each book online to read free
before you decide, will it be eBooks or paperbacks?!
NARC is based on the biggest carriers in space, built in Kure, Japan,
by Mitsubishi Aerospace. (In Aphelion, you'll visit the dockyards and watch one
of these monstrous ships launched.) Each carrier is a kilometer in length;
they house a squadron of four gunships, and the "descant troops," units of
armored soldiers, whose task is to jump into the urban battlefield and
lock horns with the high-tech of syndicates like Equinox and Death's Head.
The carriers are also the base ships for a small flight of fighter-inerceptor
aircraft, the VM-104 Corsairs, plus a dozen transports, and a motley assortment
of other light craft, including at least one Yamazake Apogee.
But the urban battleground is only one of the fronts on which NARC
fights. Their war is more often about data, jurisdiction, espionage
and "deep cover" work, assignments taking their special agents ... such
as Kevin Jarrat and Jerry Stone ... undercover into the hearts of the
syndicates.
It's dangerous work, which will one day probably claim their lives —
and they know it. In Death's Head the urban battlefield is the smoggy,
dirty slums beside the spaceport.
In Equinox, it was the heart of a vast city
smoldering in the deep emerald shade of the gas giant, Zeus. In Scorpio,
the warzone is an arctic region where humans have built fantasy cities to
escape from both the climate and the old, corrupt city bottom. Taking the
Angel war into these zones stretches NARC to its limits.
And in Aphelion,
the urban battleground is the frighteningly fragile world of a skycity in
the Jupiter system, where human lives are protected from thwe vacuum by a
shell of armorglass, and battle of any kind should be unthinkable ... but the
Angel syndicate that believes it 'owns' the city believes otherwise.
As the first story opens, Death's Head, Kevin Jarrat has been in deep cover for a long time —
much too long, so Stoney believes. He has infiltrated the Death's Head syndicate,
but pushes his luck too far, too ofen. Sur enough, when his cover is broken and the
syndicate discovers he is 'a NARC,' Jarrat is running for his life.
He is badly beaten and left for dead. Meanwhile, Stoney is fighting
his own battles, and he will ultimately lose. Terminally addicted to Angel,
he is traded back to NARC in a terrorist-style prisoner exchange,
with little time left to live.
The price of Stone's life is an empathic bonding between the two men which will test their
feelings for one another as well as their relationship with NARC itself; and the
alchemist of this 'magic' is an empathic healer from the high valleys above the
city of Eldorado.
He is Harry Del, and in the DEATH'S HEAD UNABRIDGED edition (vastly longer than
the version published in 1991 by GMP, and reprinted in 1999 by Millivres)
we learn that he's one of 'the Rethan mutations.'
In fact, he's an 87/T, and
people like Harry are up against a deep-seated prejudice which is all too natural
to humans ... which of us would like a stranger to know exactly what we're
feeling at any moment? Resentment, fear, amusement, desire? These are feelings
humans need to mask. But from a powerful empath, there is no mask.
Two NARC Captains, empathically bonded...? very Two senior officers becoming
lovers, against every ground-rule the department ever set? And the empthy itself,
which NARC's Research and Development division hopes to turn into a field tool,
even a weapon ...? Jarrat and Stone face a new and personal fight. To stay with
NARC, retain their command, and not let R&D turn them into lab rats. R&D is
determined to try; and if they can't have Jarrat and Stone, they'll take Captains
Auel and Cruz, against every protest Harry can make. In fact, they're already
doing it, and Harry Del is so angry —
Plot spoilers are beginning to sprout like mushrooms. It's time to meet
the characters ... the 'big boys' troopers Gil Cronin and 'Indian Joe' Ramos; the carrier's
executive officer, Mischa Petrov, the observer, Gene Cantrell, who's waiting for his
own ship to launch; the 'gamor-boy pilot,' Curt Gable; the Barbadian Colonel Bill Dupre, who stands
betweeen Jarrat and Stone and NARC Central, on Earth ...
Meet the characters, and them, Get
your teeth into these novels, start reading. 40% of each book is online, FREE, and these
are not small books. Around 550pp of 'contiguous samples' from the books are yours for the clicking.
The eBooks and paperbacks are waiting for you right here when you can't
stop turning pages, and have to have the rest!
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 Chris Harper's guarantee: every title is hand-picked, a real book with genuine content. No
'pamphlets,' no junk, nobody trying to sell you something. And not one syllable
about net marketing and 'get rich quick' schemes! All
this, and bargain prices ... browse now?
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