Swords and Spaceships for January 5

Persephone Station is a backwater planet that the United Republic of Worlds is content to ignore while a corporation makes its home there—and keeps its secrets. Rosie is the owner of a bar that caters to tourists and criminals; Angel is a criminal who does a favor for her. The result is that they both end up in hot water with the corporation—and its private army.

Noah, a man with a shiny new PhD in genetics lands his dream job at a company where he gets to design new lines of living, breathing dragons. These creatures have mostly been used for industrial purposes until now, but the company’s eager to break into the general retail market by designing dragons into the perfect pet. But Noah has other ideas, and his own changes he wants to make to the draconic genome…

A newly-minted 16-year-old Jedi Knight named Vernestra Rwoh is handed a first assignment that feels frustratingly like a babysitting gig: supervise an aspiring inventor four years her junior as they head to a new space station. But bombs go off in the ship as soon as they’re out of reach of easy help, and Vernestra has to keep her charge and several other survivors of the bombing alive after they land their escape pod on a nearby moon.

A humble scribe who thought she was only supposed to record the great deeds of others discovers she may have more power than she could have imagined in a world that stands at the brink of the next Great Dying.

Every seven years, nine Greek gods must walk the earth as mortals. There, they are hunted by those eager to kill a god and seize their immortality. Lore is the survivor of a line of these hunters who were brutally murdered by a rival family. Now, she’s got a chance for revenge against the man-turned-god responsible for their deaths.

Twelve years after a bloody war that has left two nations licking their wounds and smoldering with leftover animosity, the villagers of an isolated village named Jalard have been largely untouched by this trauma. But their yearly contact with the outside world brings shocking changes. Normally, representatives of the Academy come to take two villagers away to join the institute, which has been a great honor. Until this year, when a shocking announcement leaves the residents of Jalard questioning just where their people have been going all these years.