Military Engineering

Missy Carter leads a rather boring, overworked life as a system analyst for the State Department, or rather that’s what she lets everyone believe. As a Shadow Agent with the Paranormal Security and Intelligence, she’s seen and done it all. Intelligence is her specialty; assassination is her hobby. She’s learned to handle anything life can throw at her. That is until the biggest paramilitary pain in her backside shows up again. Lucky for him, he’s good looking.

Wally Schirra was the only one of the original seven NASA astronauts to command a spacecraft in all three pioneering space programs - Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. This chronicle of his experiences takes us into space on Schirra's 1962 Mercury flight that orbited Earth six times and aboard Gemini for the first rendezvous of two manned craft in space.

In 1954, the US Air Force launched an ambitious program known as WS-117L to develop the world's first reconnaissance satellite. The goal was to take photographic images from space and relay them back to Earth via radio. Because of technical issues and bureaucratic resistance, however, WS-117L was seriously behind schedule by the time Sputnik orbited Earth in 1957 and was eventually cancelled. Eyeing the Red Storm examines the birth of space-based reconnaissance from the perspective of WS-117L.

Two framed soldiers turned Liberators, an unhinged Vice-Admiral with mass murder on his mind, and a new rebellion. After deserting the Sarkonian Empire and stealing one of their best stealth ships, Alyss Cortez and Farah Shahi knew it would be like this. Always looking over their shoulder for a far-reaching enemy. But they aren't running or hiding. Instead, the pair are accepting search and rescue jobs and planning to take down Vice-Admiral-Kaska, antimission by antimission. Except that they didn't expect things to go so wrong.

They once thought dark energy was the ultimate power in the universe. They were mistaken. And now a desperate race is underway to be the first to discover how The Formation helped create life in the universe. But with the power to create life also comes the power to destroy it. This was power even the wise and ancient Aris knew was too great for them to possess. Now imagine what it could do in the hands of a mere mortal...such as Adam Cain.

Lt. Wayson Harris is one of thousands of clones born and bred to be the ultimate soldiers. But unlike the others, Harris is an outlawed model - one with independent thoughts and an addiction to violence. Presumed dead after his troops were massacred, Harris - who blames the U.A. for the slaughter - has gone AWOL as a bounty hunter. Still, it’s hard for a clone to overcome his conditioning, and Harris finds himself drawn back into the U.A.'s service by his mentor and creator, Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber.

During the early and most dangerous years of the cold war, a handful of Americans, led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, revolutionized spying and warfare. In great secrecy and beyond the prying eyes of Congress and the press, they built exotic new machines that opened up the Soviet Union to surveillance and protected the United States from surprise nuclear attack. Secret Empire is the dramatic story of these men and their inventions, told in full for the first time.

What if a society banished its worst nightmare to the far edge of the solar system, destined to sip dregs of light and struggle for the barest living? What if that life thrived, grew, learned, and became far more than anyone ever expected, yearning to return to the sun? What if it didn't share your moral compass in any way? The Glittering Edge duology describes the clash of forces when an advanced society that has filled a solar system with flesh-and-blood life meets the near-AIs it banished long ago.

Between 1817 and 1898, New York City evolved from a vital Atlantic port of trade to the center of American commerce and culture. Although this important urban transformation is well documented, the critical role of select Union soldiers turned New York engineers has, until now, remained largely unexplored.

Short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke Award 2014, this is a Frankenstein tale for our time. Vic returned from war tormented by his nightmares. His once happy marriage to Beth all but disintegrated. A machine promised salvation, purging him of all memory. Now the machines are gone, declared too controversial, the side effects too harmful. But within Beth's flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back and that she can rebuild her husband piece by piece.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

At 2:00 a.m. on October 2, 2001, Robert Stevens entered a hospital emergency room. Feverish, nauseated, and barely conscious, no one knew what was making him sick. Three days later he was dead. Stevens was the first fatal victim of bioterrorism in America. Bioterrorism expert Leonard Cole has written the definitive account of the Anthrax attacks. Cole is the only person outside law enforcement to have interviewed every one of the surviving inhalation-anthrax victims, along with the relatives, friends, and associates of those who died.

Smallpox, the only infectious disease to have been eradicated, was one of the most terrifying of human scourges. It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life. In this riveting, often terrifying look at the history of smallpox, Jonathan B. Tucker tells the story of this deadly disease, the heroic efforts to eradicate it worldwide, and the looming dangers it still poses today.

In the 1960s humans took their first steps away from Earth - and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity, and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream has ended. In early 2011 Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era.

Many veterans of war, upon their return home, choose to never speak about their time serving in the military, hoping to put it behind them and forget. But some veterans don’t hesitate to share their stories and experiences with anyone who will listen. Whether talking about it is their way of coping with what they witnessed and endured, an effort to pass on to the next generation a small slice of history, or an attempt to preserve the memories for themselves, doesn’t really matter.

The Darkness is coming. When it strikes, Volka, Carl, 6T9, and Sundancer will have to join forces with an unlikely ally to learn the key to defeating it. An ally who is cold, cunning, and despises all of them - Alexis, Captain Darmadi's wife. If Volka and Carl can manage not to kill her, 6T9 can refrain from sleeping with her, and Sundancer can keep them all from being blown up, humanity may have some hope. Strap in! It's bound to be a bumpy ride.

CT has one goal: to take on the most powerful planet colonization corporation in the world and bring them to their knees. The corporation wasn't worried. After all, CT was just one man with a small crew of beautiful women. They should be worried. They should be very worried.

My own people, Anoza not humans, came in the night to kill me, to kill my unborn child, to finish an ancient evil. Only Dallas Blake, wounded and bleeding, stood against them, but he did. It was all that we could do to just fight for our very lives, but that was not the end of it. The evil ones had kidnapped my father. How much worse could this get? To rescue my father, the five moons would be pitted against unknown forces with technology a million years more advanced.

Orson Scott Card, Kevin J. Anderson, and Larry Niven have seen the future. Now you can, too. A constellation of the brightest lights in the science fiction and fantasy firmament have judged these authors to be the best, the brightest, the truest emerging stars in the field.