Nick Turnhouse is a Dorset farmhand, a third son with nothing to inherit and no future, working his father's land for his keep. He is also tall, powerfully built, and handsome, and crosses the path of Squire's impressionable daughter. Nick has to run, fast, with ten shillings and his father's blessing. Luckily, or so he thinks, he comes across a kind gentleman who can help him. After Nick is persuaded to say that he is looking for work, he discovers the man is recruiting for the Navy, and Nick has just 'volunteered in fact'.

Lieutenant Gilbert Maltravers is bored. It is 1912 and he has been promoted as fast as any in his Dartmouth class and is placed in a battleship where he can confidently look forward to promotion to post captain and a battleship of his own by the time he is forty. All he needs to do is keep a smart ship, polish the brass and salute every senior officer, while wearing an expensive uniform that testifies he is one of the right sort. His father is an admiral, so very little can go wrong.

Captain Nathaniel Perry has survived the Battle of Waterloo with some slight distinction, and finds himself respected in his fashionable mess on the regiment's return to England. That is a problem, for he has no private income. He had managed well enough on his pay on campaign, but could not do so in the Peace. Simultaneously with his promotion to major in acknowledgement of his actions at the Battle, he is called to London at the behest of a dying grandfather, a merchant who had disowned him, disapproving of his mother's marriage. Perry discovers he is the sole surviving heir . . . and rich.

Midshipman Johnnie Wharton has no idea when he joins HMS St George as a 12-year-old that he is soon to take part in some of the greatest sea battles of Nelsons Royal Navy. Life aboard his next ship HMS Gibraltar is tough for the youngster and he and the other officers face disgrace as his Captain blunders badly at the Battle of the Glorious First of June.

Everyone could see it coming. But one man could do something about it. Oh, he couldn't avert the nuclear holocaust, but a scientist in Austria, ruthlessly using billions of research dollars for his own purposes, set himself up and out: he created a time machine, and filled a warehouse with low-tech survival gear. Too bad he didn't get to use it himself. Instead, a team of American grad students, led by their professor, is sent back to the late Roman Empire. Even though they are experts in this time and place, they are about to realize that books and actual experience are very different things.