When the National Security Agency’s invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage…not by guns or bombs but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence. Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in.

In Wyoming, a little girl reads people’s darkest secrets. In New York, a man sensing patterns in the stock market racks up $300 billion. In Chicago, a woman can go invisible. They’re called "brilliants," and since 1980, one percent of people have been born this way. Nick Cooper is among them; a federal agent, Cooper has gifts rendering him exceptional at hunting terrorists. His latest target may be the most dangerous man alive, a brilliant drenched in blood and intent on provoking civil war. But to catch him, Cooper will have to violate everything he believes in.

Particle physicist Jon Grady is ecstatic when his team achieves what they've been working toward for years: A device that can reflect gravity. Their research will revolutionize the field of physics - the crowning achievement of a career. Grady expects widespread acclaim for his entire team. The Nobel Prize. Instead, his lab is locked down by a shadowy organization whose mission is to prevent at all costs the social upheaval sudden technological advances bring.

He invented a machine to take people to the future. Then he was accused of murder, but he can't remember killing anyone. Billionaire genius Byron Gaines is accused of murdering his wife and her lover, but he swears he didn't do it. This couldn't have come at a worse moment: He is so close to a breakthrough in his research. He's about to invent a device that will change the world forever. The irony is, if only he had a little more time, he'd be able to make his legal problems disappear - along with himself.

After decades hunting wanted offworlders throughout the solar system, Corporate Bounty Hunter Malcolm Graves doesn't bother asking questions. So long as the pay is right, he's the man for the job. And he always works alone. But when a high-profile bombing on Earth has Pervenio Corp clamoring for answers, they force him to team up with a strange, cyber-augmented partner. A young man more interested in statistics than instinct. Their assignment: Track down a suspected group of extremists from Titan who will go to any length to free their moon from the grip of Earth's corporations.

Jon Reznick is a “ghost”: a black-ops specialist who takes his orders from shadowy handlers, and his salary from the US government. Still mourning the loss of his beloved wife on 9/11, he’s dispatched to carry out a high-level hit. Reznick knows only that it must look like suicide. It’s textbook. But the target is not the man Reznick expected. The whole setup is wrong.

Fantasy. Sci-fi. The world was brought back from the brink of annihilation, but its still-new institutions are rattled once again as heroes and criminals clash in a neon-drenched cyberpunk metropolis.

When she first agreed to lead the research team of the Niantic Project, Dr. Devra Bogdanovich knew she was headed into the unknown. What she never could have imagined is where her dangerous, and potentially world-changing, exploration of Exotic Matter would lead her.

Astronomer and TV science guy Gevin Rees just landed the interview of a lifetime with the world's most famous physicist. Remarkable, because the eccentric genius is notoriously reclusive, and he's already dead. What happens next forces Rees to run for his life from not one but two deadly assassins and global powers desperate to bury what he's just uncovered. Mind-blowing technology and solid evidence that would rewrite religious history and challenge the faith of billions.

Immortal cultivators are outlaws. They are hunted and executed, and their magic is illegal. Anti-cultivation propaganda posters are plastered on every street corner. The Counter-Cultivation Division investigates, the elite Black Corpses are sent in for the kill. None are spared. Mercy does not exist. But did the cultivators really bring the War of Tribulation? Are they actually responsible for the Heavenly Curse? Are they truly the bloodthirsty psychopaths the government paints them to be?

Alex McLeod paid dearly during the war for independence from Earth. It left the detective disfigured, jaded and alone. In the aftermath of victory, Alex seethes as criminal factions and cold-blooded killers clash over control of the newly-liberated confederation. In his crusade for justice in the free states, he's willing to break more than a few rules along the way...

The only home Alex knows is the slums of Slab, an orbiting city teeming with lowlifes, back-stabbers and gene-spliced monstrosities. From the grimy streets of his city to the lawless Asteroid Belt, Alex goes toe-to-toe with a sharp-clawed vigilante, a mythical serial killer, and a gorgeous vampire with an ominous message. His quest won't end until his homeland earns the freedom it was promised…

But even Alex may not be able to stop the impending Reckoning and a voyage to the one place he swore he'd never return: Earth...

After long years of war, the United States has sued for peace, yielding to a brutal coalition of nations ruled by fascist machines. One-quarter of the country is under foreign occupation. Canadian businessman Barry Simcoe arrives in occupied Chicago days before his hotel is attacked by a rogue war machine. In the aftermath, he meets a dedicated Russian medic with the occupying army and 19 Black Winter, a badly damaged robot. Together they stumble on a machine conspiracy to unleash a horrific plague - and learn that the fabled American resistance is not as extinct as everyone believes.

You know about the invasion of Earth, and the Garde who will do anything to stop it. Yet there is still so much to learn. The stories in Zero Hour will help you get the answers you seek, but only the Garde and their allies can save our planet.

Doctor Impossible, evil genius and diabolical scientist, has tried to take over the world in every way imaginable, but this time is going to be different. He'll have to contend with Fatale, however, a rookie superhero on her first day with the Champions, the world's most famous superteam. She's a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, a gleaming technological marvel built for the next generation of warfare.

When the terrorists who killed his mother return, 19-year-old Chandler wants to enlist to fight in the coming invasion. But in the neon city of Heim, nothing is what it seems. His loved ones are starting to vanish without any explanation, and until now, his physical stats have kept the military out of reach. But then, he encounters a stranger who talks of genetic secrets from a clandestine government project. Secrets that, when unleashed, could transform Chandler into a weapon, unlike any his world has seen.

He invented a machine to take people to the future. Then he was accused of murder, but he can't remember killing anyone. Billionaire genius Byron Gaines is accused of murdering his wife and her lover, but he swears he didn't do it. This couldn't have come at a worse moment: He is so close to a breakthrough in his research. He's about to invent a device that will change the world forever. The irony is, if only he had a little more time, he'd be able to make his legal problems disappear - along with himself.

They tried to destroy our planets. Our way of life. They tried to send us into extinction. But we, the Coalition, fought them and won. That was a decade ago. They’re known as the Host: a cabal of aliens seeking to dominate our sector of space. And they’re back - with help from a powerful new enemy. We’re outnumbered and unprepared. But there is hope. An ancient race of long-dead but technologically advanced aliens called the Navigators have a ship called the Blackstar that could potentially turn the tide. That is if I, Kai Locke, a humble ship racer, can find it and learn how to harness its power in time.

Doctor Impossible, evil genius and diabolical scientist, has tried to take over the world in every way imaginable, but this time is going to be different. He'll have to contend with Fatale, however, a rookie superhero on her first day with the Champions, the world's most famous superteam. She's a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, a gleaming technological marvel built for the next generation of warfare.

NYPD detective Paul Donner and his wife Elise were killed in a hold-up gone wrong. Fifty years later, Donner is back: revived courtesy of the Shift. Supposedly the unintended side-effect of a botched biological terrorist attack and carried by a ubiquitous retrovirus, the Shift jump-starts dead DNA and throws the life cycle into reverse, so reborns like Donner must cope with the fact that they are not only slowly youthing toward a new childhood, but have become New York's most hated minority.

The first to disappear is a ski instructor in the secluded mountains of Colorado. Hours later, a pregnant woman is abducted from a crowded hospital. Two places, two incidents, a single motive. And so it begins....

In the 21st century, the perfection of faster-than-light travel and the rise of a prodigious artificial intelligence known as the Eschaton altered the course of humankind. New civilizations were founded across the vastness of space. Now, the technology-eschewing world known as the New Republic is besieged by an alien information plague. Earth quickly sends a battle fleet - but is it coming to the rescue, or is a sinister plot in motion?

Joel Byram is an everyday 22nd century guy. He spends his days training artificial-intelligence engines to act more human, jamming out to 1980s new wave - an extremely obscure genre - and trying to salvage his deteriorating marriage. Joel is pretty much an everyday guy with everyday problems - until he's accidentally duplicated while teleporting. Now Joel must outsmart the shadowy organization that controls teleportation, outrun the religious sect out to destroy it, and find a way to get back to the woman he loves.

History is rewritten in an instant as the future smashes into the past, and high-tech hardware goes head to head with World War Two technology. In the chaos that ensues, thousands are killed, but the maelstrom has only just begun. The veterans of Pearl Harbor have never seen a helicopter, or a cruise missile - let alone nanotechnology, ceramic bullets, and F22 Raptor stealth jetfighters. Allied and Axis forces are then caught in a desperate struggle to gain the upper hand.

Rogue hackers Petal and Gabriel are low on food and water. Their reputation precedes them and they are no longer able to hustle the crime community for supplies. With survival becoming harder, they’re left with no other choice but to accept a risky job from a dangerous individual. The two will have to negotiate with the Tinker - a woman whose reputation for psychotic behaviour is known across the nuclear-blasted Abandoned Lands; infiltrate a town overrun with killers; and recover a cache of exceptionally rare information.

In 1901, Queen Victoria passed away and took over the responsibilities of the paranormal court. When Victoria ascends to the paranormal throne, she acquires the help of a human agent, code-named Rogue.

A thrill-seeking Harvard linguistics professor and an ultrasecret branch of the Catholic Church go head-to-head in a race to uncover the secrets of the lost city of Atlantis. The ruins of the technologically advanced, eerily enigmatic ancient civilization promise their discoverer fame, fortune, and power...but hold earth-shattering secrets about the origin of man. While world-famous linguist and archaeologist, Thomas Lourds, is shooting a film that dramatizes his flamboyant life and scientific achievements, satellites spot impossibly ancient ruins along the Spanish coast.

Not far in the future, the seas have risen, and the central latitudes are emptying. But it's still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor.

Humankind has escaped a dying Earth and set out to find a new home among the stars aboard an immense generation ship affectionately named the Ark. Bryan Benson is the Ark's greatest living sports hero, enjoying retirement working as a detective in Avalon, his home module. The hours are good, the work is easy, and the perks can't be beat. But when a crew member goes missing, Bryan is thrust into the center of an ever-expanding web of deception, secrets, and violence.

In the summer of 1947, an unidentified object crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. There were no survivors. Now it's happened again. But this time, two creatures have emerged from the wreckage alive.

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.