The Bear that Painted the Stars

An impossible discovery: a patch on a Zhg-controlled asteroid throws the delicate human-Zhg balance into peril. The threat of annihilation looms. Humanity must respond. In a risky operation. Dallic and his team are sent into mitigate the threat. He soon finds himself in a foreign alien culture, and thrust into a high-stakes, life-and-death struggle where a thousand-year-old secret he has kept threatens to destroy everything—including humanity. In this action-adventure science fiction novella, Jeffrey A. Ballard, a classically trained scientist, weighs the cost of humanity's survival against tying to remain human in the process.