Navigation is simple ... but don't forget to "drill down." This is a wiki, and many layers deep. The wiki takes the form of lists of lists, and some lists have lists of their own!

SEARCH:

As a registered member, you're at liberty to post, comment, create new pages of your own, and maintain them. There are very few "rules and regulations," but before you get started, please take a few minutes to scan the Terms of Service ... which is NOT a legal document!  

Help is available in the form of tutorials, User Forums and The Guide ... enjoy!  

Still reeling from an accident that left his face scarred, Joey avoids as much contact with other people as possible.  But when Joey meets a blind violinist, they both discover that together and with love, they can both break down the boundaries they’ve set for themselves. More...

Shy and uncomfortable with his height, Quinn Delaney doesn’t have much luck with men.  A singles’ trip to Disney World sounds awful to him, but a promise forces him to go.  Then he meets sexy Josh Hart and is instantly attracted. More...

Max Tomlin is an advertising genius, but he doesn't know much about love. Can sexy Joe Bennett teach him? More...

The artist whose life is in tatters, and the model who's hiding secrets so deadly, they could both die! More...

Sean has a new life, leaving behind an infamous identity and painful past. After rescueing a homeless teenager, he finds a chance at love with the police officer answering the call. More... 

Best selling erotica author, Amanda Young presents a new twist on the vampire genre. More...

Roman warrior Lucius doesn't believe anyone could want him, a man with an ugly, twisted leg. He resists his attraction to Varick, while his pleasure slave tries to convince his master he desires him. More... 

•   Advertise with us!

Mel Keegan's Hellgate

A vast science fiction series with a richness seldom seen outside the works of Bear and Heinlein ... action and intruigue comparable to Tom Clancy ... and the gay heroes you've come to expect from Mel Keegan. The HELLGATE series is six novels -- four available now, two due for Christas 2009, completing a saga which began in 2001. These are serious books. Big books, with a single enormous plotline that will stretch your imagination as well as lifting your pulse rate! 

SETTING THE SCENE:
On the edge of a region of space so terrible it has long been known as 'Hellgate,' the super-carriers of Earth's DeepSky Fleet play an endless cat-and-mouse game with the starship wreckers, the privateers who, alone, can navigate the wilds of the Rabelais Drift.

The super-carriers are the most magnificent ships in space, but under the iron control of a corrupt officer corps, unanswerable to any authority, parsecs from the nearest center of civilian or military justice, these leviathans have become hellships where conscripts are used up and discarded. And in an era where enforced conscription is a way of life, anyone — everyone — will serve the DeepSky Fleet. Many will be assigned to carriers.

It is thirty years since the Confederacy instituted its 'strong Fleet policy,' first taxing the far-flung colonies to build the ships, then conscripting their young people to crew them. Decades ago, Earth's military scientists first became aware of a shadowy nemesis, a faceless enemy so powerful, humankind's closest companion in this region of space was obliterated.

The same fate awaits Mankind, with only the DeepSky Fleet holding defiance against the dimly perceived foe known simply as the Zunshu. But as the day grows ever-nearer for the DeepSky Fleet to fight this ultimate battle, its infrastructure is rotting at the core.

The super-carriers can barely keep pace with the wreckers — mere human foes — and their abused crews have no concept of the mission they were recruited and trained to fight.

Into this arena of misery step two unlikely players. Travers and Marin are from worlds so vastly different, they have only their conscripted military service in common — that, and the desire to survive, to see justice done, and to uncover the truths still hidden by Earth's distant government. Travers is still in the service, but his connections to the privateer fleet would be more than enough to execute him. His current assignment is the super-carrier Intrepid, his field of conflict, the Rabelais Drift ... Hellgate.

In an age of rampant injustice, often justice must be pursued on a personal level. This mission brings Curtis Marin aboard the carrier as the executor of a sanction purchased by a citizen whose son was murdered by a travesty of justice. Marin has come aboard as an assassin ... if he can stay alive long enough to complete his mission ... and if the carrier herself can survive the corruption of her officer corps, the endless battle with the privateers, and the insuperable forces of nature that churn across the ripped face of the void known as Hellgate.

BOOK ONE: THE RABELAIS ALLIANCE:
The deep-space action of this volume is set aboard the super-carrier Intrepid. Under the command of an officer corps more interested in increasing their own personal wealth, the carrier has become another of Fleet's hell-ships. This is the arena where Curtis Marin and Neil Travers meet ... and the fight for survival of the entire crew takes place scant days later.

In this book, we meet Marin's uncommon friends, Mark Sherratt, Mark's son, Dario, and Dario's partner, Tor Sereccio. Mark Sherratt is the power behind the shadowy, mysterious Dendra Shemiji, an organization popularly characterized as a society of assassins; but Dendra Shemiji is much more than this. Dario Sherratt's vocation is "cryptocybernetics," and his work takes him to the crux of the real threat in the Deep Sky: the Zunshu.

And Neil Travers's friends will play a major role in the fortunes of the survivors of the Intrepid and Sherratt's group. Captain Richard Vaurien commands a crew of privateers, physically outside the law of the Confederacy, flying of "Freespace," with two goals in mind. They are dedicated to freeing the colonial DeepSky from the tyranny of the homeworlds ... and dedicated also to the conquest of Hellgate, Rabelais Space, of which come the Zunshu. [Read more, including sample chapters and reviews...]

BOOK TWO: DEEP SKY:
Six centuries in the future, Mankind faces our darkest struggles for survival, and our only allies are the last, fugitive remnants of the race long believed extinct...

Amid worlds of ice and skies of fire, the war for the deep frontier has begun, and Neil Travers and Curtis Marin are back in the thick of the action, along with Vaurien's group, Sherrat's people, and the core-group assembled by Harrison Shapiro.

While the Confederacy tries to use the DeepSky Fleet to crush the breakaway colonies, a handful of rebels may be the only force standing between the new human homeworlds and the shadowy enemy which almost exterminated the last race to whom these far-flung stars were home. The Resalq have survived ... but the threat is greater than ever. On one hand, the Zunshu strike out of Rabelais Space, also known as Hellgate. On the other hand, the government of Earth is determined to bring the unruly colonies back into line. Between the two, the humans of the frontier worlds and the last of the Resalq fight to survive, and the odds are against them. Nothing is what it seems, with allies within the Fleet and enemies among the Freespacers. And when Travers and Marin are assigned to the super-carrier Kiev on the Omaru blockade, all bets are off, and it’s every man for himself.

New characters provide astonishing plot-twists, and new villains actually escape in this novel, leading our people toward the dens of city bottom, and the no-man's-land of Freespace, beyond the frontier. These stories were told in HELLGATE #3 and #4: CRY LIBERTY. [Read more, including sample chapters and reviews...]



BOOK THREE: CRY LIBERTY:
The Colonial Wars have exploded across the face of Omaru ... the unknown, unknowable Zunshu have begun to devour the worlds beyond the storms of the Rabelais Drift ... the Confederacy can only try to tighten its grip on the Deep Sky ... the last of the Resalq fight a covert battle for the survival of all ... and Harrison Shapiro’s war — the desperate struggle for the liberty of the every soul on the ‘deep frontier’ — might die stillborn.

Curtis Marin and Neil Travers are at the spearhead of action which will take them from the heights of On’rabi to the deepest pits of city bottom, on a world under siege ... and the future of the new worlds of the Deep Sky will be found in the dark heart of Hellgate. [Read more, including sample chapters and reviews...]


 

BOOK FOUR: PROBE:
Recovering from the events of Cry Liberty, Neil Travers and Curtis Marin are pleased to be mere spectators for a time ... but the scenes at which they are on the sidelines are beyond their imagination.

The super-carrier Shanghai has driven into the Deep Sky, poised for the invasion of Ulrand ... on Kjorin, Dario Sherratt believes he has discovered the key to the Zunshu stasis chamber ... in the storms of the Rabelais Drift the Wastrel plays pool with cosmic forces ... in Marak ‘city bottom’ Vaurien and Jazinsky pit themselves against old enemies.

And Michael Vidal prepares to fly the mission of his life, into the dark heart of Hellgate, a place known to the Resalq as El’arne ... ‘The stormy side of the sky.’ Into this void, the explorer Ernst Rabelais vanished many years ago; and out of it, the Zunshu strike at the new human worlds as they once destroyed the Resalq.

For Travers and Marin these are strange, bittersweet days, filled with self-discovery yet shadowed by fear. They long for the so-called ‘Colonial Wars’ to be over, yet find themselves at the very crux of the danger, politics and intrigue as General Harrison Shapiro makes his gambit.

The stakes are the liberty and the survival of the Deep Sky.

The books' own pages have sample chapters, reviews, interviews,

and the buy-me buttons you're looking for by now!