Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas

Contains the novellas "Eater-of-Bone," "Veritas, ""Truth," and "A Billion Eves."In the Marrow universe, humans are touring the Milky Way inside a derelict machine the fabled Great Ship. They are immortal and durable souls, and as they travel, some become colonists on distant worlds. Eater-of-bone is the brutal, lovely and wrenching story of a lost colony on one ancient, metal-starved world. In that wilderness, humans are nearly indestructible monsters, and they are their own worst enemies, and a young woman survives a brutal assault, finding herself washed to the shore of the oddest island paradise. Veritas is set in a distant, profoundly transformed past. The aging emperor sits before cameras, explaining how a couple of college students in the 21st century could assemble a private army, buy a few time machines, and then invade Rome in the days after the death of Julius Caesar. Which is when the difficult work began. Truth is another invasion-by-time-travel story. But it is our world that is being invaded by temporal Jihadists , or so it seems. A man from the future sits inside a secret prison, telling stories to his American captors, while the world outside goes horribly wrong. What if there was a machine that could take you and your surroundings to an alternate Earth? And what if a frustrated young man used that device to steal away the young women inside a sorority house, setting himself up as the ruler of a new world? A Billion Eves carries that what-if to its logical, borderline-hopeful conclusion.