Earth's armed forces have stopped the Lanky advance and chased their ships out of the solar system, but for CDC officer Andrew Grayson, the war feels anything but won. On Mars, the grinding duty of flushing out the twenty-meter-tall alien invaders from their burrows underground is wearing down troops and equipment at an alarming rate. And for the remaining extrasolar colonies, the threat of a Lanky attack is ever present.

Mars has been under Lanky control for more than a year. Since then, the depleted forces of Earth's alliances have rebuilt their fleets, staffing old warships with freshly trained troops. Torn between the need to beat the Lankies to the punch and taking enough time to put together an effective fighting force, command has decided to strike now.

The assault on Earth was thwarted by the destruction of the aliens' seed ship, but with Mars still under Lanky control, survivors work frantically to rebuild fighting capacity and shore up planetary defenses. Platoon sergeant Andrew Grayson must crash-course train new volunteers - all while dulling his searing memories of battle with alcohol and meds.

Vicious interstellar conflict with an indestructible alien species. Bloody civil war over the last habitable zones of the cosmos. Political unrest, militaristic police forces, dire threats to the solar system. Humanity is on the ropes, and after years of fighting a two-front war with losing odds, so is Commonwealth Defense Corps officer Andrew Grayson.

The alien forces known as the Lankies are gathering on the solar system's edge, consolidating their conquest of Mars and setting their sights on Earth. The far-off colony of New Svalbard, cut off from the rest of the galaxy by the Lanky blockade, teeters on the verge of starvation and collapse. The forces of the two Earth alliances have won minor skirmishes but are in danger of losing the war.

There is a personal price to pay for having aligned with the wrong side in a reckless war. For Aden Jansen it's the need to adopt a new identity while keeping his past hidden. Now he's integrated himself aboard the Zephyr, a merchant ship smuggling critical goods through dangerous space. But danger is imminent on planet Gretia, as well. Under occupation, torn between postwar reformers and loyalists, it's a polestar for civil unrest.

Across the six-planet expanse of the Gaia System, the Earthlike Gretia struggles to stabilize in the wake of an interplanetary war. Amid an uneasy alliance to maintain economies, resources, and populations, Aden Robertson reemerges. After devoting fifteen years of his life to the reviled losing side, with the blood of half a million casualties on his hands, Aden is looking for a way to move on. He’s not the only one. A naval officer has borne witness to inconceivable attacks on a salvaged fleet. A sergeant with the occupation forces is treading increasingly hostile ground.

Peacetime can be a rough adjustment for the battle-hardened Merry Band of Pirates.  

Especially when aliens don’t get the memo that the shooting is over.

The galaxy follows a logical structure. Legion Dark Operator Kel Turner believed that. To know the order of battle and how an enemy unit was organized was to know its purpose and how to destroy it. That logic existed down to the smallest scale, down to what made up life itself. To know a molecule’s structure was to know its function - they were one and the same. It was no different for Kel. He was Dark Ops and Dark Ops was him. But the covert action arm of the Legion is changing. And so is he. And if Dark Ops is no longer the same, how could Kel be Kel?

A lonely planet circles a star on the very border of Province 921. Critical resources produced there are claimed by both the Mogwa and the Skay. War between the Galactic giants becomes more likely every day. 

From the thrilling Ember War story arc, the epic sci-fi adventure continues with Ember War Pathfinders. Light the Way: When a mysterious gate is found on an ancient planet, the Pathfinders are called in to light the way into the mysterious dimension it holds. Lieutenant Karl Anderson leads his crack team on a mission to a mysterious world, and what awaits them is an alien menace beyond anything they’ve ever encountered before.... Belisarius: The greatest disaster in Pathfinder history. What happened to the crew of the starship Belisarius?

A company of Army Rangers is sent on an interstellar colony ship to secure a foothold on a dangerous, alien planet through violence of action. Leaving behind a warring Earth flung headfirst into a conflict of mutual assured destruction, the Rangers and the accompanying crew of first colonists are guided on a 40-year journey by an unprecedented artificial intelligence. But when they emerge from the frigid embrace of cryosleep, they awake to a nightmare, finding themselves greeted by the same ruthless enemy that brought about the ruin of Earth. 

A secret buried in the Antarctic. A puzzle unsolved for thousands of years. And a Brooklyn-born master gunnery sergeant who's royally pissed that he has to babysit the researchers sent to figure it all out. But when Patrick "Wic" Finnegan finally sees what the team has uncovered, he can't believe his eyes, nor is he prepared for the violence to come. Soon, the portal opens and unleashes a storm of unbridled fury upon humanity.

One thousand years later. Humanity has left Earth behind and is rapidly expanding throughout the galaxy under the banner of The Union, a white supremacist government who racially ‘purified’ the human race hundreds of years in the past. Living on the fringe of this twisted Fourth Reich society, Dark Horse - the only Black man in the Union - commandeers a vessel and scours the galaxy for his missing teammates under the guise of an Exo-Hunter, seeking out exo-planets to satiate the Union’s need for colonization.

Five survivors find themselves on the planet Anyar, including Joseph Colsco, Mark Caldwell, and Heather Chen. Some others have different destinations. Cast away on a planet with bizarre physical features unlike anything on Earth, Dan and Liza Oglethorpe will never again set foot on Earth. They will never again talk with family and friends. They will never again see an ocean. They are thrust into a fantastical fate that eventually leads them, six years later, after dangers are overcome and a measure of peace is achieved, to a morning in a dry valley on an alien planet.