The number-one threat to our nation’s security is in cyberspace. The new US president wants to tackle the urgent problem head-on and launches a top secret line of defense: Net Force. But before the organization can be announced, the country is hit by an unprecedented, two-pronged terror attack.

Charged with spotting terrorist threats, the top-secret "Campus" has its hands full when Middle East thugs and Colombian drug lords join forces. New Campus recruits include Jack Ryan Jr., son of master spy John Patrick Ryan, now President.

A terrorist bomb explodes during a South Korean celebration of the anniversary of the election of its first president. Alarms are raised in Washington. No one is claiming responsibility. The first suspect is North Korea. Could it be making a power play against South Korea and unification? If so, how will the U.S. respond? Paul Hood, Director of the Op-Center, must answer these questions. The Op-Center, a largely autonomous new agency which takes on the government's toughest security problems, is only six months old, and has never been given a foreign crisis until now.

In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: the Net Force. A Union Jack appearing on computer screens all over the world is just a harbinger of the danger to come. As cyberspace is thrown into chaos, several computer experts suffer strokes while hunting the deadly hacker in virtual reality. One of them is the Net Force's own Jay Gridley.

Reeling from a shattered personal life, Net Force Commander Alex Michaels is informed that top secret information from a joint air force-navy venture has been accessed and downloaded. The research involves an atmospheric weapon with the capability to drive half a country into madness using low frequency wave generation. Now the technology has fallen into the wrong hands - and testing has begun....

In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: the Net Force. It's the rich man's drug of choice - and it's being sold on the Internet for a thousand dollars a capsule. A potent mixture of smart drugs, psychedelics, angel dust, and steroids, it can turn a 50-year-old into a raging beast of aggression and sexual desire. Now it's up to the Net Force to find the source of this dangerous designer drug.

Jacob Snow—elite soldier-turned-CIA agent, haunted by his tortured past—is one of the CIA’s greatest assets and is dispatched when the stakes are highest. When an ancient Egyptian relic goes missing under mysterious circumstances, Jacob knows this is no run-of-the-mill robbery: The relic holds a secret—one that could destroy everything.

Minor viruses are eating away at the Net Force computers. The email shut-downs and flickering monitors are hardly emergencies - but they've been keeping the tech department hopping. Same with the sudden rash of time-consuming lawsuits. No one in the Net Force has a moment to spare, which is exactly the way Mitchell Townsend Ames wants it. Because when the shadowy mastermind launches his master plan, he wants Net Force to be looking the other way....

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man—a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness. Now, he is going to prove that for him, there's no gray area between killing for a living-and killing to stay alive.

Fully armed and with all hands onboard, the nuclear submarine Starbuck sailed into the calm Pacific Ocean for sea trials - and vanished. No wreckage, no signals, no survivors: nothing...until ace maritime troubleshooter Dirk Pitt finds a single chilling clue in the shark-torn surf off Hawaii - the log of the Starbuck. 'Do not search for us, it can only end in vain....' A crazed journal of madness and death is all that remains.

Kurt Austin and his crew are back to slake their thirst for action as they attempt to drown an eco-extortionist's plan to control the world's freshwater supply. From deep within the Venezuelan rain forest emanates the legend of a white goddess and a mysterious tribe with startling technical accomplishments. Few believe the tribe exists, and even fewer suspect its deity can change the course of history.

On the snow-covered slopes of Utah, the unthinkable has just become a nightmarish reality: thirty Secret Service agents have been viciously executed and the vacationing president of the United States kidnapped by one of the most lethal terrorist organizations in the Middle East - the Fatah Revolutionary Council. But surviving agent and ex-Navy SEAL Scot Harvath doesn't believe the Fatah Revolutionary Council is responsible for the attack.

Though the head of a major multinational corporation and a key player in world affairs, Samuel Walker Cox has a past that few people know about. But that group is about to get bigger. A computer disk has fallen into the hands of the Net Force, outing the powerful American businessman as a former Russian spy.

Maira Kanhai has had enough: Since the Green Poison epidemic hit DC, her cybersecurity degree is worthless, she can’t rejoin the US Navy, and her early efforts to secure Maryland led to a costly mistake: the death of her brother. Every day new factions emerge, trying to burn her city to the ground - until the Division emerges, inspiring hope. When a grenade kills one of their agents, Maira suddenly has a chance to make a real difference as a raw new Division recruit...if she can pass the tests and overcome the enemies plotting to permanently eliminate the Division once and for all.

More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to Earth long ago. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers - men and women who risk their lives by skydiving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need.

The number-one threat to our nation’s security is in cyberspace. The new US president wants to tackle the urgent problem head-on and launches a top secret line of defense: Net Force. But before the organization can be announced, the country is hit by an unprecedented, two-pronged terror attack.

Rumor has it there's a Russian you can turn to if you're very rich, and need dirty deeds done without a trace. The CIA calls him Ivan the Ghost because he's operated for years without leaving a trail or revealing his face.

From the Audie-nominated narrator of The Martian. In eleven years' time, a million members of an alien race will arrive at Earth. Years before they enter orbit, their approach will be announced by the flare of a thousand flames in the sky, their ships' huge engines burning hard to slow them from the vast speeds needed to cross interstellar space. These foreboding lights will shine in our night sky like new stars, getting ever brighter until they outshine even the sun, casting ominous shadows and banishing the night until they suddenly blink out.

The Galahad, a faster-than-light spacecraft, carries 50 scientists and engineers on a mission to prepare Kepler 452b, Earth's nearest habitable neighbor at 1400 light years away. With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope. After 10 years in a failed cryogenic bed - body asleep, mind awake - William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.

"DAMN THE VALLEY" was a phrase regularly uttered by the men that spent any amount of time in the Arghandab River Valley during the deployment of 2 Fury to Afghanistan in 2009-2010. The valley has claimed bodies from the troops of Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and more recently, the Russian Army. Operating in the valley was like nothing the men could have envisaged, they called it the "meat grinder." It was a deployment that the media didn't talk about, and the government doesn't acknowledge.

For years CIA officer Sam Hudson has been hunting Konstantin, a Russian deep cover operative responsible for a string of assassinations in the West—and he believes a well-placed source in Geneva can finally get him close to the killer. But when their meeting is ambushed, Sam’s partner is murdered and he barely makes it out alive himself. Back in the States, the bosses put him on leave and want him to drop his obsession with Konstantin, but Sam can’t let a man who’s taken so many lives slip away again.

In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: the Net Force. A Union Jack appearing on computer screens all over the world is just a harbinger of the danger to come. As cyberspace is thrown into chaos, several computer experts suffer strokes while hunting the deadly hacker in virtual reality. One of them is the Net Force's own Jay Gridley.

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.

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.

Every town needs a hero, and Detective Cal Farrell fits the bill. He stopped an active shooter six months earlier, and now he’s become the darling of the Alexandria press. The problem is that Cal remembers nothing from that day. He’s working with a psychiatrist to recover his memories, but hasn’t had much luck. Then, on one of his morning runs, he is once again the first on scene for a grisly discovery—a body hanging impossibly high on a tree. Soon there’s another victim, killed by a blade and dumped in a ravine.

As a Secret Service agent, Nick Averose spent a decade protecting the most powerful men and women in America and developed a unique gift: the ability to think like an assassin. Now, he uses that skill in a little-known but crucial job. As a "red teamer", he poses as a threat, testing the security around our highest officials to find vulnerabilities - before our enemies can. He is a mock killer, capable of slipping past even the best defenses.

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.

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man—a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness. Now, he is going to prove that for him, there's no gray area between killing for a living-and killing to stay alive.

Keera Duggan was building a solid reputation as a Seattle prosecutor, until her romantic relationship with a senior colleague ended badly. For the competitive former chess prodigy, returning to her family’s failing criminal defense law firm to work for her father is the best shot she has. With the right moves, she hopes to restore the family’s reputation, her relationship with her father, and her career.

With an introduction by J. J. Pierce, this volume features the 12 most important stories by Cordwainer Smith, a unique writer who has fused wonder and poetry into imaginative tales that transcend both science and fiction.