SNAFU HeroesFour tales of military horror from Jonathan Maberry, Weston Ochse, Joseph Nassise, and James A Moore.A supplemental volume to SNAFU, this book contains short stories and novellas from four of the best military horror writers in the field.From demons to horrors from the deep, the battles keep on coming.Fight or die…50,000 words to keep you on the edge of your seat.

    But soon it’s discovered that Warwick killed dozens of people as he strove to perfect another improved Ticker for Penny, and he’s put on trial for mass murder. On the last day of Warwick’s trial, the Farthings’ factory is bombed, Penny’s parents disappear, and Penny and her brother, Nic, receive a ransom note demanding all of their Augmentation research if they want to see their parents again. Is someone trying to destroy the Farthings...or is the motive more sinister?Desperate to reunite their family and rescue their research, Penny and her brother recruit fiery baker Violet Nesselrode, gentleman-about-town Sebastian Stirling, and Marcus Kingsley, a young army general who has his own reasons for wanting to lift the veil between this world and the next. Wagers are placed, friends are lost, romance stages an ambush, and time is running out for the girl with the clockwork heart.

    But when she ducks into the ladies’ room at the library, she’s put in the crossfire between an elderly janitor and a ravenous muck-monster that emerges from the sink. Dani’s previously unknown power manifests in self-defense, and she floods and burns down the library—at the same time. Enter Ben, the janitor, who works for the Cleaners, a supernatural sanitation company that keeps reality tidy and safe...and a company Dani now works for as well, whether she wants to or not. This puts a significant crimp in her dream to attend med school and become a doctor. Nor is Ben happy, since it’s his duty to help Dani adapt to the job and learn to control her chaotic talent before it kills them both. Dani barely has time to try on her new company uniform before she and Ben are hunted down by a cult that wants to cleanse all life from the planet, and believes her power provides the means to do so. While fighting to survive the cult’s increasingly violent recruitment attempts, the pair must battle dust devils, navigate a maze of mystical sewers, face down trash golems—and scrub the occasional toilet.

    . . and sorcery. Welcome to Low Town.In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its cham­pion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs. Every day is a constant hustle to find new customers and protect his turf from low-life competition like Tancred the Harelip and Ling Chi, the enigmatic crime lord of the heathens.The Warden’s life of drugged iniquity is shaken by his dis­covery of a murdered child down a dead-end street . . . set­ting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. As a former agent with Black House—the secret police—he knows better than anyone that murder in Low Town is an everyday thing, the kind of crime that doesn’t get investi­gated. To protect his home, he will take part in a dangerous game of deception between underworld bosses and the psy­chotic head of Black House, but the truth is far darker than he imagines. In Low Town, no one can be trusted.Daniel Polansky has crafted a thrilling novel steeped in noir sensibilities and relentless action, and set in an original world of stunning imagination, leading to a gut-wrenching, unforeseeable conclusion. Low Town is an attention-grabbing debut that will leave readers riveted . . . and hun­gry for more.

     Future America is dangerous and bankrupt. The interstate highways are littered with the rusted hulks of ambushed cars and trucks, and only Mad Max would dare travel the back roads. When an arms race with Russia and China to develop time travel for military purposes achieves success, the body count skyrockets as both patriot and enemy try to hijack the new technology. Like the Manhattan Project and Operation Overtime before it, such a project attracts the best and the brightest as well as the worst and the psychotic. But not everyone has given up on the rule of law. In Tennessee, Fayette County D.A. Pete Dance wants to prosecute the murder of a man whose fossilized remains turn up after a series of devastating earthquakes. The problem is that the victim is still alive. When the violence starts, it doesn’t stop until the final whirlwind of teeth and claws and lasers. The first spinoff series from William Alan Webb’s immensely popular series The Last Brigade is described by one critic as “…Spectre agents chasing Fast and Furious through Jurassic World,” while another reviewer added “…with a heavy dose of Harry Bosch for good measure.” “After the heart-pounding finale, you won’t see the shocking ending coming. Guaranteed to keep you awake at night.”

    James Wainwright is a brilliant but socially stunted working class engineer with a flair for invention and a propensity towards violence. Together they solve the mysteries that Scotland Yard cannot. This novel is the first in the Galvanic Century series of steampunk mysteries.

    The lone survivor of her family’s unexplained assassination, she was saved by an ingeniously crafted clockwork heart. But the time she was given won’t last forever. Now, every tick-tock reminds her how fragile her existence is and hastens her quest to expose Killian Markham, the navy admiral who shattered her world and left her for dead. But Everley’s hunt for justice will be a long and hard-won voyage.Her journey takes her to a penal colony on a cursed isle, where she will be married off and charged to build the new world. It is here, and beyond, that hidden realms hide, treasures are unearthed, her family secrets are buried, and young love will test the strength of her makeshift heart. When Everley discovers Markham may not be who he seems, her pursuit for truth is bound to his redemption, her tragic history, and her astonishing destiny.

    For Adam Hale, the thrill of plunging his tiny ship into the unimaginable maelstroms on the king of planets helps him forget the blood-soaked tragedy that ended his military career. Rachel Price came to Jove Station to find her missing partner, Zane Hale, who is also an intelligence operative for the Republic. To do that, she must convince Zane’s brother—the man responsible for slaughtering dozens of her friends on Mars—to help her. Amid the crowds of the first annual system-wide storm diving competition, they stumble onto an insidious conspiracy that changes everything they thought they knew about each other and themselves. They must overcome the past and work as one or Jupiter will eat their bones.

    Heat vision? Super strength? Flight? They are nowhere to be found. Instead, powers like photosynthesis or the ability to spontaneously change hair color seem to be the best the world can offer. To make matters worse, the gifted individuals tend to suffer from psychological issues. Nonetheless, in hopes of finding enough functional meta-humans to form a squad, in 1965 the US military created The Guardian Project. The head of the Army's current incarnation of the project hires Dr. Adam Aiken, a psychologist specializing in the meta-human condition, to filter out the most dangerously unbalanced of the prospective super-soldiers. The screening process is to be done with all possible secrecy. This proves to be more easily said than done. A misfiring superpower leaks news of the recruitment effort to the public, attracting a flood of misfit meta-humans from around the nation, each hungry for heroic validation. A sleazy PR officer knows publicity when he sees it and converts the secret program into a nationally broadcast competition with all of the dignity and grace of a reality show. The ultimate prize is a coveted spot on a government sanctioned super team.The Other Eight follows the exploits of the applicants deemed sane enough for consideration. On one side are earnest but underpowered heroes like the twitch-inducing Nonsensica or the fluorescent tube-hurling Phosphor. On the other are the better equipped but less dedicated recruits like walking good luck charm Johnny on The Spot and seed-spitting loose cannon The Hocker. Who will win a place on the team, and what will be done about the jilted heroes who didn't make the cut?

    Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he’s available…for a price.For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can’t refuse.The 200-year-old “godfather” of the Budayeen’s underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.Wry, savage, and unignorable, When Gravity Fails was hailed as a classic by Effinger’s fellow SF writers on its original publication in 1987, and the sequence of “Marid Audrian” novels it begins were the culmination of his career.

    When an ex calls for help, he risks the wrath of his enigmatic master to try and save her daughter.But when Taggert realizes the daughter has more power than even he can imagine, he has to wrestle with the very nature of his skills, not to mention unmanned and uncreated gods, in order keep the girl safe. In the end, Taggert will have to use more than his power, he has to delve into his heart and soul to survive.The Liminal People is a fast-paced science fiction thriller with shades of the Matrix or Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels don’t worry, you haven’t read this before: this is something all new.

    The son of infamous London criminal Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, he has turned his back on his family’s mobster history and aims to live a quiet life. That orderly existence is suddenly upended when Joe activates a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism. His client, Edie Banister, is more than the kindly old lady she appears to be—she’s a retired international secret agent. And the device? It’s a 1950s doomsday machine. Having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the British government and a diabolical South Asian dictator who is also Edie’s old arch-nemesis. On the upside, Joe’s got a girl: a bold receptionist named Polly whose smarts, savvy and sex appeal may be just what he needs. With Joe’s once-quiet world suddenly overrun by mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago and pick up his father’s old gun...

    OTHERS GIVE ALL TO SAVE THE ONES THEY LOVE. The war has arrived at home. James McCoy, the youngest son of a starfaring merchanter family, never thought he would face an invasion. But when an undefeated enemy slags his homeworld and carries off his brother and sister, nothing in the universe will stop him from getting them back. Not all wars are fought on the battlefield. Hard times show the greatness in men, and those who give all are changed forever. When James got stuck with dockyard duty while Ben and Stella get to go planetside without him, he never thought he might never see his older brother and sister again.But shortly after they leave, a Hameji battle fleet invades the star system, turning it into a deadly war zone. As James flees with his father on the family starship, he can only look on powerlessly as the Hameji reduce their homeworld to molten slag. But Ben and Stella are not dead. When James learns that they've been captured and enslaved, he vows to rescue them, no matter the cost.

    His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna. As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city’s fate. In the end, there’s only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk.

    They built the guns that won the Great War before it even began. They built the airships that tie the world together. And, above all, they built Evesden-a shining metropolis, the best that the world has to offer.But something is rotten at the heart of the city. Deep underground, a trolley car pulls into a station with eleven dead bodies inside. Four minutes before, the victims were seen boarding at the previous station. Eleven men butchered by hand in the blink of an eye. All are dead. And all are union.Now, one man, Cyril Hayes, must fix this. There is a dark secret behind the inventions of McNaughton and with a war brewing between the executives and the workers, the truth must be discovered before the whole city burns. Caught between the union and the company, between the police and the victims, Hayes must uncover the mystery before it kills him.