Time and Time Again — Marius Smith

In the year 2511, nearly two years after the destruction of Earth, the last human colony is thriving on the desert planet Copernicus. But its hopeful prosperity is threatened when Muteki finds a way to return from the dead, with the help of a few of his loyal followers. While taking refuge in a mountain range away from the colony, Muteki discovers an ancient underground terraforming facility left by the planet's previous inhabitants thousands of years earlier. When he activates the equipment he triggers a global storm, giving him and his followers an opportunity to escape from Copernicus in a stolen ship that they've upgraded with some of the ancient alien technology. William and the crew of the time ship Dynasty pursue him into the past to prevent him from interfering with history, as any such changes in time would still affect the colony on Copernicus. When they land in 1934, William and Luke meet a local vicar who has an inexplicable resemblance to Professor Zahlmann, who in their time is a member of the Copernicus colony.

Meanwhile, Muteki has taken the opportunity of William and Luke's absence from Dynasty to abduct Larissa and Cerah. Using them as leverage, he coerces William and Luke into stealing a powerful artefact, the Sapphirus Tempus, which he intends to use to follow his original plan of rewriting human history as he sees fit. Muteki's plan will affect more worlds than just Earth and Copernicus, as William realises when they find the body of a dead alien in the ancient Egyptian desert.

With the terraforming equipment on Copernicus active, and the planet becoming more viable, concerns arise that the former inhabitants might return to reclaim their abandoned world. And now that the belligerent Gultorians have learned the location of humanity's colony, an invasion seems imminent. William and Luke must find a way to defend Copernicus from the many threats that could mean the end of the last survivors of the human and vampire races. Amid it all, the voice of an old enemy calling across the centuries offers words of both hope and warning.