Critically acclaimed and award-winning author RJ Barker blends themes of survival, camaraderie, and the unknown in this trilogy of high-concept space adventure novellas. Beasts of the Wild Black The DST Thunberg , a Deep Strike ship, has received a garbled distress signal from a remote and unexplored planet, and the ship’s skeleton crew of humans—and humanoid animals—must be prepared for anything. Especially when the remote planet they’re orbiting turns out to have a powerful planetary defense system, capable of knocking them out of the sky. As the mysteries pile up, it seems this planet may not be so unexplored after all . . . Pride of the Wild Black At the Deep Strike base on Broom IV, Major Alice—along with her cat, Moose—is testing her new system for animal mechs when life, as ever, intervenes. One of her ships has been reported missing, and the more she looks into it the more she thinks she’s stumbled across something other parties would rather she not get involved in. Meanwhile, she’s embroiled in some tricky negotiations with an alien species who want something from her; she just can’t quite work out what. But Major Alice isn’t a quitter. And if she’s able to work out what these aliens are after, she might just unravel the whole thing. Lost in the Wild Black The freighter Magpie has crashed on Inimical XXIIIV, and it’s up to the Deep Strike rescue ship Rosa to find the crew. But the planet in question is a seething hellworld of vicious alien life that grows so quickly no signs of the crashed ship are left. Capt. Vin Loach must balance the slim possibility of success with the far higher probability of losing his crew. As if that weren’t enough, Vin finds himself facing pressure from the CBF, a fanatical splinter group with a small fleet of strangely advanced ships. They demand he find the Magpie and are more than willing to sacrifice him and his crew. Little by little, Vin’s options for escape are cut down, as the CBF intend to force him onto the planet. There’s nothing he can do about it but hope for a miracle. But sometimes, in the wild black, miracles do happen.