The BSD North conference draws some of the smartest people in the world. These few days will validate Dale Whitehead’s work—or expose him as a fraud.

When a tragic death devastates the conference, only Dale suspects murder.

Computer geeks care about code.

But do they care enough… to kill?

Liberate?

The alien ate its way out of Antarctica, devouring and duplicating every living thing it found. Humanity turned continents to glass and oceans to poison in a desperate effort to stop it—and failed.

Nobody expected that once the alien copied everyone, once it owned the world, it would set the copies free.

Police detective Kevin Holtzmann fled with his family into the desert, and almost survived. Now a new Kevin must figure out the terrifying new world’s rules before the world eats him alive—again. His life teeters between the yesterday’s nightmares and tomorrow’s unknown horrors.

But humanity’s best and worst features survived. Life means hope, and terror, and joy, and fear. New life means new dangers. New threats. New crimes…

Good thing he’s a new Kevin.

There’s no ground at all.

The people exploring and exploiting alien universes risk everything, including their lives. But Devin Gupper’s death makes no sense. And the more questions security officer Aidan Redding asks, the less rational it seems.

But in a bottomless universe full of impossibilities, one impossible murder begins everything...

Change it. Then watch it try to kill you.

Solve a murder in a universe without ground to stand on. Investigate inexplicable deaths a few million years after the Big Bang. Take too many breaths and never go home again. Let the antimatter trickle between your fingers, and visit five alien universes in this first Montague Portal omnibus.

Contains:

Forever Falls

Hydrogen Sleets

Drinking Heavy Water

Sticky Supersaturation

No More Lonesome Blue Rings

With her father's death, mercenary thief Beaks returns to the place she hates most—her childhood home, to both pay her respects and make certain he's gone.

She finds only lies.

Determined to rip the truth out of the shadows, Beaks ricochets around the world, defying killers and government agents alike. With the man she loves and the secretive hacker Sister Silence, she targets a nightmare that turns suffering into profit and slaughter into joy.

Family. It's worse than murder.

50% Robin Hood

100% trouble

Reeling from the death of her lover and partner, freelance “exfiltration specialist” Billie Carrie Salton breaks into a high-tech, high-security biotechnology firm to steal their sickle cell anemia cure and broadcast it to the world.

In, out, announce. Easy.

Except Salton’s life never works that smoothly.

And a gig gone wrong only begins the disasters. 

Thievery, lies, and betrayals propel Salton across the world, from Atlanta, Georgia, to the heat of Portugal and the jungles of Myanmar, where she must put everything on the line to save everything she loves.

After accidentally solving two murders, Dale Whitehead hungers to stay in his apartment, hack virtual memory stacks, and forget the whole thing. Instead, his boss sends him to a technology/sci-fi convention in Detroit. He plans to endure his stint at the vendor table, stumble through his presentation, and escape anonymously.

A dead body ruins everything.

Dale finds himself battling liquid nitrogen ice cream, balky network addressing schemes, the Chaos Machine, and his own reputation, while the corpses pile up.

"Wait to see if it happens again:" Great for troubleshooting IPv6 multicast over wireless. Not so much for murder.

Politics.

Monsters.

Murder.

The alien Absolute eradicated Earth’s native life, replacing a fraction of it with alien duplicates. Kevin remembers the life of a police officer, but must find a new life in the bizarrely warped landscape of northern Michigan.

But even astonishingly resilient alien flesh breaks down, with enough effort.

Or enough electricity.

Absolute eradicated humanity. But his copies brought the worst parts of humanity with them…

Not a normal night anywhere.

Terry is the archetypal old-school Unix admin, nurturing servers with care and precision while avoiding the latest trendy garbage. KDE and Gnome on a server? Nope, if you need a GUI use FVWM.

The latest trend Terry refuses? One adopted almost everywhere? Systemd, the replacement init.

So Systemd comes for Terry.

Wearing skin-tight leather pants.

No, not a normal night in the computer room at all…