The world has been brought to its knees by the “zombie virus.” Nations have fallen, cities have been overrun by the infected, and the human race has come perilously close to extinction. But with the first winter come and gone, the infected have been reduced to not much more than a background nuisance, and survivors around the world are taking stock and vowing to rebuild and rise up stronger, better, and unafraid.

All-new stories from New York Times best-selling author John Ringo’s “Black Tide Rising” series:

Kevin J. Anderson
Brendon DuBois
Jody Lynn Nye
Michael Z. Williamson
Kacey Ezell
Mike Massa
Christoper L. Smith
Lydia Sherrer
Jason Cordova
Brian Trent
Patrick Vanner
Jamie Ibson

For more than fifty years, the Terran Republic and the Terran League have been killing one another. The death toll has climbed ever higher, year after year, with no end in sight. But the members of the Five Hundred, the social elite of the Republic’s Heart Worlds, don’t care.

Rear Admiral Terrence Murphy is a Heart Worlder. His family is part of the Five Hundred. His wife is the daughter of one of the Five Hundred’s wealthiest, most powerful industrialists. His sons and his daughter can easily avoid military service, and political power is his for the taking. There is no end to how high he can rise in the Republic’s power structure.

All he has to do is successfully complete a risk-free military “governorship” in the backwater Fringe System of New Dublin without rocking the boat. But the people sending him to New Dublin have miscalculated, because Terrence Murphy is a man who believes in honor. Who believes in duty—in common decency and responsibility. Who believes there are dark and dangerous secrets behind the façade of what “everyone knows.”

Terrence Murphy intends to meet those responsibilities, to unearth those secrets, and he doesn’t much care what the Five Hundred want. He intends to put a stop to the killing.

Terrence Murphy is coming for whoever has orchestrated fifty-six years of bloodshed and slaughter, and Hell itself is coming with him.

Marshall Hunter only wanted to fly: the faster, the higher, the better. But a life of rescuing wayward spacefarers and derelict satellites in the cislunar cruiser U.S.S. Borman is far from the adventure he’d imagined. But his fortunes change when a billionaire couple goes missing on their way to a near-Earth asteroid. Out of contact and on a course that will eventually send them crashing into Mars, the nuclear-powered Borman is dispatched on an audacious, high-speed interplanetary run to bring the couple home. As they approach the asteroid, however, the Borman itself becomes hopelessly disabled.

With the Borman suddenly out of commission and far beyond reach, cislunar space begins falling into chaos as critical satellites fail and valuable lunar mineral shipments begin disappearing in transit. Nothing is as it seems, and Marshall Hunter and the rest of the crew suspect none of it is by coincidence.

IN A BUSINESS LIKE MONSTER HUNTING, IT’S ALL ABOUT SETTING PRIORITIES

The chaos god Asag has been quiet since the destruction of the City of Monsters, but Monster Hunter International knows that he is still out there, somewhere—plotting, waiting for his chance to unravel reality. When Owen and the MHI team discover that one of Isaac Newton’s Ward Stones is being auctioned off by Reptoids who live deep beneath Atlanta, they decide to steal the magical superweapon and use it to destroy Asag once and for all. But before the stone can be handed off, it is stolen by a mysterious thief with ties to MHI and the Vatican’s Secret Guard.

It’s a race against time, the Secret Guard, a spectral bounty hunter, and a whole bunch of monsters to acquire the Ward Stone and use it against Asag. For as dangerous as the chaos god is, there is something much older—and infinitely more evil—awakening deep in the jungles of South America.

Decades ago, the Visitors descended on Earth. They claimed to bring peace and prosperity. Their real goal was the total subjugation of humankind. But humanity did not give up its only home without a fight.

After a devastating war, the Visitors were driven back to Mars. Their millions of willing human collaborators were left behind. The task of hunting down these former alien collaborators and bringing them to justice falls to Federal Recovery Agents like Nathan Foster.

Now, Nathan Foster is tasked with bringing to justice Emmogene Anderson. As a teenager, Emmogene was experimented on by the Visitors and implated with a device that allows her to control other people. With her is her obsessive ex-lover, who was also a former commando of the Visitors’ forces. It’s an easy enough job—but Emmogene has been implanted with something else, something much more important.

Nathan and Ben must decide what is right in a largely lawless world—and the fate of the planet hangs in the balance.

The most popular alternate history series of all continues. When a cosmic disturbance hurls your town from twentieth-century West Virginia back to seventeenth-century Europe—and into the middle of the Thirty
Years War—you have to adapt to survive. And the natives of that time period, faced with American technology and politics, need to be equally adaptable. Here’s a generous helping of more stories of Grantville, the American town lost in time, and its impact on the people and societies of a tumultuous age.

Featuring stories by Eric Flint, Tim Sayeau, Robert Noxon, Griffin Barber, Bjorn Hasseler, Clair Kiernan, Margo Ryor, Mark Huston, Robert Waters, Phillip Riviezzo, Jack Carroll, Terry Howard, Tim Roesch, Sarah Hays, Mike Watson, Iver P. Cooper, Kerryn Offord, Rick Boatright, Brad Banner, Anne Keener, Jackie Britton Lopatin, Bjorn Hasseler, David Carrico, and Tim Sayeau.

The world has been brought to its knees by the “zombie virus.” Nations have fallen, cities have been overrun by the infected, and the human race has come perilously close to extinction. But with the first winter come and gone, the infected have been reduced to not much more than a background nuisance, and survivors around the world are taking stock and vowing to rebuild and rise up stronger, better, and unafraid.

All-new stories from New York Times best-selling author John Ringo’s “Black Tide Rising” series:

Kevin J. Anderson
Brendon DuBois
Jody Lynn Nye
Michael Z. Williamson
Kacey Ezell
Mike Massa
Christoper L. Smith
Lydia Sherrer
Jason Cordova
Brian Trent
Patrick Vanner
Jamie Ibson

For more than fifty years, the Terran Republic and the Terran League have been killing one another. The death toll has climbed ever higher, year after year, with no end in sight. But the members of the Five Hundred, the social elite of the Republic’s Heart Worlds, don’t care.

Rear Admiral Terrence Murphy is a Heart Worlder. His family is part of the Five Hundred. His wife is the daughter of one of the Five Hundred’s wealthiest, most powerful industrialists. His sons and his daughter can easily avoid military service, and political power is his for the taking. There is no end to how high he can rise in the Republic’s power structure.

All he has to do is successfully complete a risk-free military “governorship” in the backwater Fringe System of New Dublin without rocking the boat. But the people sending him to New Dublin have miscalculated, because Terrence Murphy is a man who believes in honor. Who believes in duty—in common decency and responsibility. Who believes there are dark and dangerous secrets behind the façade of what “everyone knows.”

Terrence Murphy intends to meet those responsibilities, to unearth those secrets, and he doesn’t much care what the Five Hundred want. He intends to put a stop to the killing.

Terrence Murphy is coming for whoever has orchestrated fifty-six years of bloodshed and slaughter, and Hell itself is coming with him.

Everyone has a different war. For some in the UN Peacekeeping mission to Grainne, the struggle is just to survive. For others, it’s to remain sane, or keep one’s friends and comrades physically and mentally intact. When the rules of engagement are in constant flux, and orders are unclear or based on false information, just getting back inside the fence can be an accomplishment.

For the rebels of the Freehold of Grainne, they must form an organized force from the shattered remnants of their military, and from grimly determined, but underequipped and outnumbered insurgents. Their war is for their very way of life. They’ll do everything and anything to stop this invasion, using whatever means are available. They mean to make the enemy suffer. Quod vulnera curare potes. “Because physical wounds heal.”

Daslakh is an AI with a problem. Its favorite human, a young man named Zee, is in love with a woman who never existed—and he will scour the Solar System to find her. But in the Tenth Millennium, a billion worlds circle the Sun—everything from terraformed planets to artificial habitats, home to a quadrillion beings.

Daslakh’s nicely settled life gets more complicated when Zee helps a woman named Adya escape a gang of crooks. This gets the pair caught up in the hunt for the Godel Trigger, a legendary weapon left over from an ancient war between humans and machines—which could spell the end of civilization.

In their search, they face a criminal cat and her henchmen, a paranoid supermind with a giant laser, the greatest thief in history, and a woman who might actually be Zee’s lost love.

It’s up to Daslakh to save civilization, keep Zee’s love life on the right track—and make sure that nobody discovers the real secret of the Godel Trigger.

WHEN LADY FORTUNE SMILES DAGGERS

What if the past is merely a playground for the future? In a new, evolving timeline, Cesare Borgia did not follow a path that led to a fatal ambush and unfulfilled ambitions, but instead employs Leonardo Da Vinci’s visionary war machines—only ideas in a notebook in our own timeline—and the sly wisdom of Niccolò Machiavelli—who suffered years of disgrace in “regular” history—in a rolling effort to unify the contentious city states of Italy. From there Borgia hopes to create a powerful Renaissance empire centuries in advance of the modern nation. But someone—or something—with shadowy motives and nefarious purposes may be aiding Borgia every step of the way. And when a beautiful operative from a future that may never be shows up to set things right, the stakes become human freedom itself in a transformed future!

About Steve White

“Creative . . . White seamlessly inserts his characters into history, blending science fiction and vintage military action to deliver a fast-paced, high-stakes story. The time travel leads to a twisty, clever series of surprises and plot mechanics.” —Publishers Weekly on Soldiers out of Time

“White offers fast action and historically informed world-building.” —Publishers Weekly

“. . . recalls the best of the John Campbell era of SF. White's core audience of hard SF fans will be pleased . . .” —Publishers Weekly

“. . . Engaging entertainment . . . much suspense and many well-handled action scenes . . .” —Booklist

It is the 43rd century and humanity occupies a substantial chunk of the Orion Spur, the small galactic arm in which Sol is located. Homo sapiens Terra has become Homo sapiens Galactica.

Following the invention of faster-than-light travel in 2530, the Great Hegira went from a trickle to a flood as human-occupied space expanded at an exponential clip. Over the centuries, rivalries grew, as did star system navies. When widespread war finally came, it raged across entire sectors.

Mass bombardments of enemy planets took their toll. Much that had been built during the preceding thousand years was smashed in flashes of nuclear fusion.

A dark age descended. Eventually, a new Pax Galactica took hold. The return of stability brought with it a renaissance. Much knowledge that had been lost was regained.

Much, but not all.

On worlds across human space, parents told their children stories of a place where once dwelt knights and princesses, magicians and dragons, where bold warriors sallied forth to victory or defeat.

What the children did not learn was where this magical place could be found. The years of chaos had robbed them of that information. The stellar coordinates of Sol were lost.

And with them, the location of Planet Earth.

Starhopper was humanity's first interstellar probe. It was designed to search for intelligent life beyond the solar system. Before it could be launched, however, intelligent life found Earth. The discovery of an alien light sail inbound at the edge of the solar system generated considerable excitement in scientific circles. With the interstellar probe nearing completion, it gave scientists the opportunity to launch an expedition to meet the aliens while they were still in space. The second surprise came when Starhopper's crew boarded the alien craft. They found beings who, despite their alien physiques, were surprisingly compatible with humans. That two species so similar could have evolved a mere twelve light years from one another seemed too coincidental to be true.

One human being soon discovered that coincidence had nothing to do with it . . .

When the sun flared out of control and boiled Earth's oceans, humanity took refuge in a place that few would have predicted. In the greatest migration in history, the entire human race took up residence among the towering clouds and deep clear-air canyons of Saturn's upper atmosphere. Having survived the traitor star, they returned to the all-too-human tradition of internecine strife. The new city-states of Saturn began to resemble those of ancient Greece, with one group of cities taking on the role of militaristic Sparta . . .

For millennia, the Makers’ Life Probes explored the farthest reaches of space in search of the secret behind faster-than-light speed. In the twenty-second century, the people of Earth made a pact with this far-flung civilization—all of the Makers’ intelligence in exchange for help in their mission.

Three hundred years later, descendants of the original Procyon expedition have returned to Earth in a starship. They find a world that has forgotten the generations-old contract.

No matter. The returning colonists have overcome far greater obstacles in their single-minded drive to redeem a promise made before any of them were born . . .

The Makers are an advanced, intelligent alien species. For hundreds of millennia, they have been on the hunt for the secret to faster-than-light travel. Their chosen instruments were the far-reaching Life Probes, in hopes of encountering other advanced civilizations out among the stars.

After a 10,000 year long journey, one of these machines stumbles upon 22nd-century Earth. Upon arrival, the probe isn’t quite sure that this planet contains anything that could be considered “advanced” or “intelligent.”

But the Makers need help from humankind—the probe is damaged and must be repaired if their search for knowledge is to continue . . .

NEW ENTRY IN THE BEST-SELLING RING OF FIRE SERIES FROM NEBULA AND DRAGON AWARD NOMINEE CHARLES E. GANNON AND ROBERT WATERS

Domingos Fernandes Calabar started out as a military advisor for the Portuguese in Brazil. But to his superiors, he was still nothing more than a mameluco, a man of mixed blood. Until, that is, the Dutch arrived and he switched sides. Then the Portuguese had a new label for him: “traitorous dog.”

But when Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp arrives, having barely survived the disastrous Battle of Dunkirk, Calabar’s job changes again. Now he has to help engineer a swift Dutch exodus to a safer place before word of Tromp’s defeat reaches Spanish ears. Partnered with the Sephardic pirate Moses Cohen Henriques, the two aid the battered Dutch fleet by striking at the Portuguese and Spanish, both on land and sea. Until, that is, Calabar learns that bitter personal enemies have grabbed his family, put them in chains, and sold them to a slaveship bound for the Spanish Main.

Calabar must now choose: continue to help the Dutch, or save his wife and children? Tromp and other strong allies want to put an end to slavery, too, but their strategies and timetable are measured in months and years. Calabar doesn’t have that kind of time and can’t rely on their methods. The struggle to recover his family, and to free the millions more suffering in shackles, is one he must win in his own way and on his own terms. Because ultimately, this is not just  Calabar’s fight.

This is Calabar’s war.

Daslakh is an AI with a problem. Its favorite human, a young man named Zee, is in love with a woman who never existed—and he will scour the Solar System to find her. But in the Tenth Millennium, a billion worlds circle the Sun—everything from terraformed planets to artificial habitats, home to a quadrillion beings.

Daslakh’s nicely settled life gets more complicated when Zee helps a woman named Adya escape a gang of crooks. This gets the pair caught up in the hunt for the Godel Trigger, a legendary weapon left over from an ancient war between humans and machines—which could spell the end of civilization.

In their search, they face a criminal cat and her henchmen, a paranoid supermind with a giant laser, the greatest thief in history, and a woman who might actually be Zee’s lost love.

It’s up to Daslakh to save civilization, keep Zee’s love life on the right track—and make sure that nobody discovers the real secret of the Godel Trigger.

Everyone has a different war. For some in the UN Peacekeeping mission to Grainne, the struggle is just to survive. For others, it’s to remain sane, or keep one’s friends and comrades physically and mentally intact. When the rules of engagement are in constant flux, and orders are unclear or based on false information, just getting back inside the fence can be an accomplishment.

For the rebels of the Freehold of Grainne, they must form an organized force from the shattered remnants of their military, and from grimly determined, but underequipped and outnumbered insurgents. Their war is for their very way of life. They’ll do everything and anything to stop this invasion, using whatever means are available. They mean to make the enemy suffer. Quod vulnera curare potes. “Because physical wounds heal.”

A NEW NOVEL IN JOHN RINGO'S BEST-SELLING BLACK TIDE RISING SERIES BY NEBULA- AND DRAGON AWARD–NOMINATED AUTHOR CHARLES E. GANNON

It was supposed to be fun. Six teenagers and their British captain aboard the ketch Crosscurrent Voyager, headed on a senior year summer cruise to excitement and adventure. Then the world as they knew it ended.

A plague spread throughout the globe, killing millions and turning the survivors into cannibalistic rage monsters—zombies, in so many words. Only by putting aside their differences were the young crew able to survive.

Now, they seek others like them, those fortunate souls who have made it through the zombie apocalypse. After all, maybe it's not the end of the world so long as GPS can help survivors navigate deadly terrain, to link up, and maybe—just maybe—ensure the continuation of the human race.

But the Earth’s GPS systems are failing. It falls to those aboard the Crosscurrent Voyager to keep the unthinkable from happening. In order to do so, they must traverse dangerous seas to a European Space Agency complex in French Guiana.

And thousands of infected stand in the way.

If they succeed, humankind has a chance of rebuilding. If they fail, humanity may well be at the end of its journey.