A Not-Quite Human Story (2) Unable to find a home and acceptance on Earth, an intrepid band of misplaced youth seek their ancestral home among the stars. Unfortunately, their reception is not what they hoped. The home they discover is a hostile environment, involved in a huge interstellar war with a hostile alien species. Viewed as untrusted interlopers, they search for a place in a universe with no use for them, and no place turn for assistance. One chapter has some explicit interspecies sex, but it's part of the plot.
Consider the plasmoids...Ancient living machines that after millennia of stillness suddenly begin to move under their own power, for reasons that remain a mystery to men. Holati Tate discovered them - then disappeared. Trigger Argee was his closet associate - she means to find him. She's brilliant, beautiful, and skilled in every known martial art. She's worth plenty - dead or alive - to more than one faction in this obscure battle.
Explorers who dread spiders and snakes prove that heroism is always more heroic to outsiders. Then there's the case of the first space pilot to Mars who developed the itch
When you've had your ears pinned back in a bowknot, it's sometimes hard to remember that an intelligent people has no respect for a whipped enemy. but does for a fairly beaten enemy.
Kirby did not know what mountains they were. He did know that the Mannlicher bullets of eleven bad Mexicans were whining over his head and whizzing past the hoofs of his galloping, stolen horse. The shots were mingled with yelps which pretty well curdled his spine. In the circumstances, the unknown range of snow mountains towering blue and white beyond the arid, windy plateau, offering he could not tell what dangers, seemed a paradise.