Dr. Xin Rou is a Chinese researcher working at the IceCube neutrino experiment at the South Pole. On lucky days a single flash might signal the passage of a ghostly interstellar particle. Suddenly, IceCube’s entire array lights up. A million detectors at once. Which is impossible. The Antarctic sky is clear and calm—but she is already running for the door.

A small island off the coast of Korea is torn apart by a bioweapon that drives everyone - men, women, and children - insane with murderous rage. The people behind the attack want Korea reunified or destroyed. No middle ground. No mercy. Soon Japan, China, and the United States are pushed to the brink of war, while terrorists threaten to release the rage bioweapon in a way of pure destructive slaughter.

We were outnumbered, outfought. Mankind was about to fall to the alien Flock. Our only chance was a desperate gamble, transforming Tier One SpecOps agents into deadly super soldiers. In the end, we won the war, but we lost the peace. The Flock surrendered and spent the next two hundred years making reparations, indentured to humanity, doing everything humans did not want to do. And the evolved super soldiers were consigned to an endless sleep. Ready if ever needed, but in time they became myths. Abandoned and forgotten.

Harry Bauer has been kicked out of the military, the only job he's ever loved. Now he’s back in New York, and unemployed—until Russian Mafia boss Peter Rusanov offers him a job wiping out the Albanian Mafia. It’s a job he figures could make him rich, until Colonel Jane Harris shows up, takes him for a ride to Pleasantville, and tells him about Cobra. Then all hell breaks loose.

Navy SEAL Keith “Chunk” Redman has been one of the military’s top doorkickers since the day he pinned on his trident: loyal, single-minded, lethal. Tasked to lead a new, covert team of Tier One SEALs—the most elite special operators in the world—Chunk can no longer simply rely on the status quo. To safeguard America, he needs help to stay a step ahead of its adversaries.

John Dempsey's life - as an elite Tier One Navy SEAL named Jack Kemper - is over. A devastating terrorist action catapults him from a world of moral certainty and decisive orders into the shadowy realm of espionage, where ambiguity is the only rule. His new mission: hunt down those responsible for the greatest tragedy in the history of the US Special Ops and bring them to justice.

Dr. Tyson Klein is a quantum physicist who has dedicated his entire life to his research. At CERN, he analyses data generated by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator. Now, Ty believes he's found a pattern in its output. It looks like an organised data stream, being broadcast over what he calls a quantum radio. Could it be a signal from another universe? A message sent from the future? Or something else entirely?

On his last combat deployment, Lt. Cmdr. James Reece's entire team was killed in an ambush that also claimed the lives of the aircrew sent in to rescue them. But when those dearest to him are murdered on the day of his homecoming, Reece discovers that this was not an act of war by a foreign enemy but a conspiracy that runs to the highest levels of government. Now, with no family and free from the military's command structure, Reece applies the lessons that he's learned in over a decade of constant warfare toward revenge.

Deep in the Afghan mountains, Sergeant Michael Pitcher discovers an object with powers that defy explanation. After interacting with it, he suffers a traumatic seizure and is flown home for evaluation. Cleared by the doctors, Michael goes home to his relieved wife, Josie. But he’s a changed man. The once-loving husband is now coldly withdrawn. When a team of scientists connected to Sergeant Pitcher vanishes without a trace, CIA agent Dean Ninemeyer comes to him for insight - only to find that the recovering soldier has also disappeared.

TOP GUN instructor Colt Bancroft has just catapulted off the USS Abraham Lincoln, his F-35C Joint Strike Fighter trailing blue and yellow flame as he climbs into the night sky off the California coast. When he is sent to investigate a series of mysterious lights floating dangerously close to his aircraft carrier, disaster strikes. His jet becomes unresponsive as it rolls inverted and enters a nosedive aimed right at the aircraft carrier’s unsuspecting escort cruiser… What follows is a tale of heroism and betrayal, spycraft and suspense, and aerial combat against an unexpected adversary.

Before he was an Elfin Lord - before he even joined that secret group of Mages - Jamie Riley was a Mage recruited by the FBI and the Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation. A new-minted Inspector sent into one of the most complicated supernatural regions in the country: Los Angeles. The rest of OSPI’s LA team has grown comfortable with allowing politics and pragmatism to decide which cases they pursue - but when Jamie’s investigation suggests that a pillar of the supernatural community has killed in cold blood, he will let nothing get in the way of getting the murderer.

Across the world, the United States recalls troops to combat civil unrest after the biggest economic meltdown in history. Marine Sergeant Ronaldo Salvatore’s platoon comes home to a powder keg that could ignite a civil war. While some see the coming collapse as the end, others see opportunity. Fleeing Naples after rival crime lords decimated his family, Don Antonio Moretti settles in Los Angeles to rebuild his criminal empire. But he is far from alone in his ambitions.

When an experiment to study quantum uncertainty goes spectacularly wrong, physics student Bill Rustad and his friends find that they have accidentally created an inter-dimensional portal. They connect to Outland - an alternate Earth with identical geology, but where humans never evolved. The group races to establish control of the portal before the government, the military, or evildoers can take it away. Then everything changes when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts in an explosion large enough to destroy civilization and kill half the planet.

Rex Walker always wanted to be like his father: a daring, adventurous man, traveling the world in pursuit of mysterious relics. While teaching anthropology at a Boston college, Rex attempts to bury the past, until he discovers a hidden clue he can’t ignore. With the help of a former student, he teams up with an alien-obsessed billionaire, and they search for the fabled Bridge. As an unidentified object nears Pluto, speculation surges. Some hail it as the homecoming of a distant alien race, and this cult is unwavering in their efforts to usher our world into a new era.

Humanity has been banished to a distant star. Left to fight over resources rationed to them by mysterious machine-overlords known as Wardens. Commander Rylan Holt labors against inter-colony arms trafficking when an informant gives him horrific news. The ruthless cartel boss, Lilith, has stockpiled outlawed weapons of mass destruction. Worse, she claims to have permission from the Wardens to unleash them upon the system.

A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past 20 years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling his teenage dream of living in Africa. Love, Africa is the story of how he got there - and of his difficult, winding path toward becoming a good reporter and a better man.

America is Gone. It’s 2003 and American forces are assembled in Kuwait for the invasion of Iraq. In Paris an assassin wakes from a coma, in the Cascades a lone hiker watches a plane fly into a mountain and just north of the Equator a modern-day pirate, a rogue-Tasmanian, is witness to the unspeakable. In one instant an inexplicable wave of energy has changed the world. From Canberra to Cairo things will never be the same.

Modern gods and goddesses, remote, revered - and like the pantheon of heroes and heroines of ancient myth - possessing great power tempered with flaws. Now, find within this anthology great tales by gifted and award-winning authors who move superheroes from the four-color panels of comic books to the fantastic pages of fiction, stories that will remind anyone who ever wanted to wear a cape or don a cowl of the extraordinary powers of the imagination!

The head of Egypt's State Internal Security is brutally murdered in a Cairo cafe - his assailant a faceless killer known only as "the Palestinian". It is the opening move in a chilling game of terror that has caught the international intelligence community completely off-guard, and the CIA turns to the one man they believe can get to the twisted roots of a looming nightmare shrouded in mystery: a former Company operative code-named Scorpion.

Cassie Klyne, 19 years old, lives in the United States in the year 2015 - but it's not our United States, and it's not our 2015. Cassies world has been at peace since the Great Armistice of 1918. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. Poverty is declining, prosperity is increasing everywhere; social instability is rare. But Cassie knows the world isn't what it seems. Her parents were part of a group who gradually discovered the awful truth: That for decades - back to the dawn of radio communications - human progress has been interfered with, made more peaceful and benign, by an extraterrestrial entity.

In number-one New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris’s "Dahlia Underground,” venerable vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers survives an attack by an anti-vampire terrorist group, only to show them they tried to blow up the wrong bloodsucker. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, a ghost assigned to assist humans in trouble, steps into the middle of a marital dispute with surprising twists in Carolyn Hart’s “Riding High”....

Keisha Lewis lived a quiet life with her wife, Alice, until the day Alice disappeared. After months of searching, presuming she was dead, Keisha held a funeral, mourned, and gradually tried to get on with her life. But that was before Keisha started to see her wife, again and again, in the background of news reports from all over America. Alice isn't dead, and she is showing up at every major tragedy and accident in the country. Following a line of clues, Keisha takes a job as a long-haul truck driver and begins searching for Alice.

Meet John Milton. He considers himself an artisan. A craftsman. His trade is murder. Milton is the man the government sends after you when everything else has failed. Ruthless. Brilliant. Anonymous. Lethal. You wouldn't pick him out of a crowd but you wouldn't want to be on his list. In this second dip into his case files (see 1000 Yards for a further novella), Milton is sent to Italy to investigate the death of a colleague from Group 15.

In 1968, after the first zombie outbreak, Wanda Mayhall and her three young daughters discover the body of a teenage mother during a snowstorm. Wrapped in the woman's arms is a baby - stone-cold, not breathing, and without a pulse. But then his eyes open and look up at Wanda, and he begins to move.The family hides the child - whom they name Stony - rather than turn him over to authorities who would destroy him. Against all scientific reason, the undead boy begins to grow....

Jo Beckett is a forensic psychiatrist who profiles victims' lives to help solve their deaths. On a San Francisco street, she is confronted by a scene of pure carnage: four dead and five injured after a high speed pursuit. In the mangled remains of a BMW lies prosecutor Callie Harding, dead with the word "dirty" written in lipstick on her thigh. Why did Harding run from the police? Why did she crash through a bridge railing? Was it an accident? Suicide? Or murder? Jo is a last resort in difficult cases.

Ann Blake, a rare-book expert and conservator, was imprisoned for a drunk-driving accident that she doesn't remember, one that resulted in the death of her husband, a famous rare-book expert. But she is freed from prison by CIA undercover agent Tucker Anderson in exchange for her help and expertise on the Library of Gold, a legendary collection of books that have been lost to the world for over a century.

In the year 2038, an act of bioengineered terrorism decimated humanity. Those who survived were either completely unaffected or developed horrible mutations. Across the globe, nations are now divided between areas populated by “norms” and lands run by "mutants" - Detective Cassandra Lee of Los Angeles's Special Investigative Section has built a fierce reputation taking down some of the city's most notorious criminals.

Ryder Creed and his dogs have been making national headlines after intercepting several major drug stashes being smuggled through Atlanta's airport. But their newfound celebrity has also garnered some unwanted attention. When Creed and one of his dogs are called in to search a commercial fishing vessel, they discover a secret compartment. But the Colombian cartels' latest shipment isn't drugs.

J. D. Jessup finds his line in the desert near Tucson, as far from his home as the moon. He’s traded his guitar and the songs in his head for the daily grind of an organic farm - a mind-numbing existence that dulls the pain of his memories. His boss has one rule: if J. D. sees an illegal, call Border Patrol. But when an early morning ride along the fence line leads him to Maria, a beautiful young woman near death, J. D.’s heart pushes him toward another choice.

Without warning, something has gone terribly awry. In the remote and unnoticed places of the world, small pockets of death begin occurring. As the initially isolated extinctions spread, the world's eyes focus on this unimaginable horror and chaos. Out of the ecological imbalance, something new and extraordinary is evolving and surviving to fill the voids left by these extinctions. Evolution is operating in ways no one could have expected, and environmental damage may be the catalyst.