Top Six Smugglers and Scoundrels in Space

Need we say more? When it comes to smugglers in space, no list would be complete without this scruffy-looking nerf herder.

A smuggler turned Empress, Hail honed her survival skills when gunrunning, but needed them more than ever when her family tracked her down and told her she'd inherited an Empire!
Find Hail in BEHIND THE THRONE (Orbit 2016) and all its sequels.

Mal, Zoe, Kaylee, Wash, Jayne – we couldn't pick just one Firefly favourite, we really couldn't.

One of Mass Effect: Andromeda's fan-favourite companions, help save her little sister from a gang of mercs early in the game and you'll have Vetra's loyalty for life.

“Making deals to get the things you want, shooting at the things you don’t. That’s me.”

Scoundrels turned Guardians of the Galaxy, these two still find time to spread a little chaos even when saving the universe.

'We are Groot.'

This scoundrel captain first appeared in ANCESTRAL MACHINES (Orbit, 2016) and he and his ragtag crew of rogues are back for another adventure in SPLINTERED SUNS, published this month!

For Pyke and his crew it should have been just another heist. Travel to a backwater desert planet, break into a museum, steal a tracking device then use it to find a ship buried in the planet's vast and trackless sandy wastes.
Except that the museum vault is a bio-engineered chamber, and the tracking device is sought after by another gang of treasure hunters led by an old adversary of Pyke's, the devious Raven Kaligara. Also, the ship is a quarter of a million years old and about two kilometres long and somewhere aboard it is the Essavyr Key, a relic to unlock all the treasures and technologies of a lost civilisation . . .

'Splintered Suns splices new and old space opera, cyberpunk, quest fantasy and heist caper -- the maddest thing I've read since Van Vogt!' 
Ken MacLeod

'Splintered Suns is a masterpiece of future nostalgia. All who love mischievous interstellar derring-do in pursuit of ancient relics of departed races as well as exotic panoplies of sentient species, all who love space opera should feast upon this generous novel. Let us revel in the admirable jaunty technicolour richness which Mike Cobley serves up so entertainingly-for this is how the universe ought to be'
Ian Watson, author of the Games Workshop Warhammer 40K novels Space Marine and The Inquisition War trilogy