I did not land here as a warrior, but a warrior I so soon became . . .

One moment, Dr. Yukiko Yamaguchi was in her high-tech singularity research lab in California, busily adjusting an electronically-leaky fitting playing hell with her instrument readings.

The next moment, she was falling through space, and landing hard in a wilderness area she would quickly discover was her family's ancient stomping grounds in Japan – but with an apocalyptic twist.

A hundred years later, there would be legends of a great yōkai, a demon, whom some called a kamaitachi – a sort-of whirlwind, weasel-like creature with blades for claws, which catches up unwary humans and slices their skin. But this kamaitachi is no ordinary yōkai – rather, she is

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

Captain Delaney Wolff Fox is back.

She's just led her team on a months-long hunt through the penal world al-Saḥra' (known otherwise by its semi-satirical name "Sanddoom"), looking for an industrial-sized illegal drug "kitchen" that's been supplying colony worlds with various illegal substances via a network of involuntary migrant "mules". That hunt ended satisfactorily, and rather explosively, with the destruction of the "kitchen" and hundreds if not thousands of personnel associated with it.

Now the team is heading back to Earth, hoping for some well-deserved shore leave . . .

. . . but it's not to be. A long-sleeping foreign agent has been found in a stasis chamber in an abandoned Chicago warehouse, and it's up to Delaney and crew to investigate the mystery, by traveling back to the year 2017 to find out why the agent was placed in stasis then, and why the stasis seems originally to have been planned to end in late 2020.

And when the sleeper wakes, asks for and consumes an entire pound of goose liver pâté, and asks for more, it's pretty obvious they've got

A Dragon In The Foie Gras

All Col. Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., USSFM – the Lion of God – wanted was a little piece of paradise to call her own.

Being stuck on a desert world – even if she was the CO of the premiere battalion of the 1st U.S. Space Force Marines that was based there – was not getting her any beach time. Mostly because, without an ocean, there's really no beach at all.

But she's got a fix for that problem.

Now, if only the academics studying the problem of terraforming the exile world of al-Saḥra' would get out of her way . . .

. . . and if only the religious fanatics who want their planet left as a desert, despite all the water from the planet's former oceans being accessible only a few miles down, will leave the terraforming project alone long enough to see the good it will bring them . . .

. . . then, the Lion would truly be in Paradise.

But even in paradise, black clouds – and black ships – can herald danger for the Lion, herself, and for her daughters as well.