WILLIAMSON. Featuring all-new stories by Larry Correia, Michael Z. Williamson, Brad R. Torgersen, Mike Massa, Kacey Ezell, and more! When the UN invaded the Freehold of Grainne, the intent was simple: Force a noncompliant star nation back into the collective. What the politicians hadn't accounted for was that the Freehold had spent 200 years as the haven for every independent, rebellious, self-reliant adventurer in human space. Its military are scattered remnants, its bases smoking ruins, its cities occupied. But Grainne and its space habitats have resources beyond measure. Retired intelligence agents, disabled veterans, animal handlers, petty smugglers, half-lame computer specialists, research scientists, planetary engineers, all have one goal in mind: Make the invaders suffer for their presumption. This isn't just resistance. It's vengeance. Stories by: Larry Correia Michael Z. Williamson Brad R. Torgersen Mike Massa Kacey Ezell Robert E. Hampson Aaron Haskins John F. Holmes Marisa Wolf Justin Watson Jason Cordova Jamie Ibson Jessica Schlenker Christopher Dinote Rob Reed Chris Smith Jaime DiNote Philip Wohlrab At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). Praise for Forged in Blood: “The anthology celebrates soldiers and their tools. . . . Most of all, it celebrates warriors and the stuff that makes them so—the mettle more than the metal.”—Tangent "Fans of combat science fiction will find this collection irresistible…an entertaining and engaging book."—The Daily News of Galveston County About Michael Z. Williamson: “A fast-paced, compulsive read . . . will appeal to fans of John Ringo, David Drake, Lois McMaster Bujold, and David Weber.”—Kliatt “Williamson's military expertise is impressive.”—SF Reviews Novels of Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold Universe: Freehold series Freehold The Weapon The Rogue Contact with Chaos Angeleyes Freehold: Forged in Blood Ripple Creek series Better to Beg Forgiveness . . . Do Unto Others . . . When Diplomacy Fails . . . Standalone A Long Time Until Now Michael Z. Williamson is retired military, having served twenty-five years in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. He was deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Desert Fox. Williamson is a state-ranked competitive shooter in combat rifle and combat pistol. He has consulted on military matters, weapons and disaster preparedness for Discovery Channel and Outdoor Channel productions and is Editor-at-Large for Survivalblog, with 300,000 weekly readers. In addition, Williamson tests and reviews firearms and gear for manufacturers. Williamson’s books set in his Freehold Universe include Freehold, The Weapon, The Rogue, Better to Beg Forgiveness . . ., Do Unto Others . . ., and When Diplomacy Fails . . .. He is also the author of time travel novel A Long Time Until Now, as well as The Hero—the latter written in collaboration with New York Times best-selling author John Ringo. Williamson was born in England, raised in Liverpool and Toronto, Canada, and now resides in Indianapolis with his children.

    He suddenly stirs, asks his assistant for paper and pen, then scribbles something down. Minutes later, he dies. History tells us that Einstein jotted down equations that night. But struggling scholar Jacob Morgan believes that history is wrong. He’s convinced that Einstein wrote a deathbed confession that night—a secret that the great scientist didn’t want to take to his grave. Jacob has spent his entire adult life obsessively hunting down that secret—with nothing to show for it but the scorn of his colleagues and the tattered remnants of a once-promising teaching career. But now, thanks to a lucky break, Jacob has a chance to get his life back on track. His appointment as an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia is a fresh start, and he’s vowed to end his pursuit of Einstein’s secret. Until history chooses this moment to deliver him one more clue. A clue that leads him to an impossible and unbelievable discovery: Time travel. And so begins the last leg of Jacob’s desperate quest, one where history is not only changeable—it’s changing. All by itself. And if Jacob doesn’t rescue Einstein’s secret, everything that he’s ever known will disappear forever.

    The world is a paradise - and then, in a moment, it ends. The council that controls the Net falls out and goes to war. Everywhere people who have never known a moment of want or pain are left wondering how to survive.

    Best to steer clear of the freaks in Voodoo, kid.”Surrounded and outgunned, a group of private military contractors known as “Strange Company” find themselves on a remote planet at the edge of known space, and on the losing end of a bad contract. Orbital D-beam strikes, dropships bristling with auto-guns, missiles, and troops - even Monarch space marines in state-of-the-art advanced battle rattle - will try to prevent the company from reaching the exfil LZ and getting off-world.For Strange, that means it’s time to hang tough and get it on with as much hyper-kinetic violence as they can muster to get clear of the whole mess. And what the Strange can’t get done by violent assault and crazy firefights, they’ll get done by the freaks of Voodoo Platoon - operators who have been changed by the Dark Labs into powerful and unnervingly unnatural asymmetrical weapons.This is the Strange Company. Because in the Strange, it’s always really Strange. Join them - and get ready for full auto combat at the furthest limits of human exploration.

    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. Their technology is vastly superior to ours, and they know they cannot possibly lose the coming conflict. But they, like us, have found no answer to the destructive force of the atom, and they have no intention of facing the onslaught of our primitive nuclear arsenal, or the devastation it would wreak on the planet they crave. So they have flung out an advanced party in front of them, hidden within one of the countless asteroids randomly roaming the void. They do not want us, they want our planet. Their Agents are arriving.

    When the Intergalactic Empire has a tough mission, they send in a wizard scout. When they have an impossible mission, they send in Wizard Scout Trinity Delgado. The planet Cavos is on the verge of civil war. Only an outmanned, outgunned force of Empire peacekeepers prevent an outbreak of bloodshed on a global scale. When the peacekeepers’ commander requests an armored regiment as reinforcements, the Imperial High Command sends him Wizard Scout Trinity instead. With only a fresh out of the university grad student and a half-crazy old pilot as allies, Trinity has to find the source of Cavos’s troubles before the Empire becomes part of a disaster far greater than a mere local civil war. Caught between the peacekeepers’ resentful commander and suspicious local government officials, Trinity and her battle computer, Jennifer, have their work cut out for them. Together they must weave their way through one mystery after another leaving a trail of bloody bodies along the way until they find the answer. That is, if they can remain alive long enough to find it.

    Cooperation between nations breaks down as every government wants the newly discovered technology for themselves. Naturally, the Cubans have beaten everyone else, and the island is beginning to change. Aircraft flying reconnaissance are swatted from the skies. Commandos can't make a landing on the beaches without being annihilated.Malena Marin is a new XCU agent with special abilities. She's sent with a team of veterans on a mission to secure the landing site or die trying. Unfortunately, the enemy knows they're coming.As the conflict grows and turns increasingly violent, the aliens themselves enter the game. And they have plans of their own…

    He's spent the last five years hiding from his past, from those responsible for the failed mission, from those responsible for running him out of the Navy, and from those originally responsible for making him into who he was - a highly-trained, physically and mentally augmented Special Forces soldier. Two mysterious visitors appear unannounced at the door of Gabriel's seedy hotel room in the slums of Jamaica. His past has finally caught up with him. From the decaying Caribbean to politically-charged South America, from the back alleys of Mars to a tiny colony on a planet six hundred light years from Earth, Gabriel's Redemption is a near-future military science fiction story of a personal journey seen from the perspective of a soldier who has lost everything -- one who desperately needs to redeem himself not only in his government's eyes, but also his own. Interstellar action and political intrigue mix with one-on-one battles on the surface of a frozen planet in Book One of the science fiction-adventure trilogy.

    The latest in that lineage, an increasingly psychotic empress, is pushing her realm toward catastrophic collapse as admirals and generals rebel against her rule. That rebellion quickly drags the once mighty Imperial Fleet into a devastating fratricidal conflict between factions. With civil war raging across human space, a Navy torn asunder can no longer protect frontier colonies, and barbarians long confined to the galactic badlands see an opportunity. After generations of hard existence on worlds beyond the bounds of human civilization, they hold life cheap, especially that of others. The barbarians will gladly steal everything they find and condemn defenseless star systems to technological and demographic collapse. That is if they don’t wipe them out entirely from sheer bloodlust or by selling survivors on alien slave markets. One man, Captain Jonas Morane of the cruiser Vanquish, saw the empire’s collapse coming years before the first admiral rebelled. When he finds himself the senior surviving officer of a loyalist Navy unit almost entirely annihilated by rebels, Morane puts in motion a plan he developed long ago. This plan was designed to not only save his ships and crews from certain death but keep humanity’s accumulated knowledge from being obliterated by the long night of barbarism. However, before his dream can become a reality, Morane must lead the remains of the 197th Imperial Battle Group through an intricate wormhole network and across a shattered empire to the sanctuary he selected, all the while dodging his former colleagues from both sides. Along the way, he rescues an Imperial Marine Corps Pathfinder battalion and the survivors of a religious order known for its mysticism, and enlists them in his cause. But will Morane’s sanctuary survive both the flames of rebellion and the depredations of invading marauders before his rag-tag fleet can reach it?

    But when he investigates the crash, what he finds will yank him out of his self-imposed exile and thrust him into a world he could have never imagined.He suddenly finds himself trapped on a damaged alien spacecraft and plunged into a universe of interstellar crime lords and government conspiracies, along the way meeting strange new friends… and enemies. As he struggles to find his way back home he is inexorably drawn deeper into a world where one misstep could mean his death. Or worse. He desperately wants to get back to Earth, but it may be the end for him. … or is it just the beginning?

    Gladiators, as they are better known, are genetically modified human champions who meet Klethos d’relle in the combat ring when the Klethos issue a challenge for a human world. Win, and the planet stays in human possession; lose, and not only do they lose their lives, but the world as well. With the Klethos much more advanced and militarily powerful, able to defeat humanity in an all-out war, the challenge ring is the only way to retain at least some of the worlds of man. While life as a gladiator is full of celebrity status and the gratitude of humanity, it comes with a heavy price. Not only is there the real risk of death in the ring, if a gladiator survives that, the “Brick,” or Boosted Regeneration Cancer, will claim her life within a few years. Lance Corporal Veal, who has found a home in the Marines, has to decide whether to accept the nomination. She would have to leave her brothers and sisters in the Corps, be assigned to the combined human gladiator course, and undergo extreme genetic modification that will leave her almost unrecognizable from the woman she was before. Becoming a gladiator will enable her to serve humanity to a far greater extent than anything else she could do as a Marine grunt, but at a tremendous personal cost. Author’s note: For those readers familiar with my other Marine-related books, this one is a little different in that there is far less combat action, particularly from a Marine unit standpoint. This novel, which is the first of three planned books that follow three different women serving as United Federation Marines or as a Navy corpsman, is more about duty, sacrifice, and what it means to serve in defense of others.

    After much travail, Roger has developed into a competent and compassionate leader of men. That competence will be tested when Roger and the Marines face an even greater challenge. The Throne of Man has been usurped. With his brother dead and the forces of an interstellar empire arrayed against him, Roger must avenge his family and fight for the just rule of a thousand stars.About The Empire of Man Series:"Will fascinate sophisticated readers (the manual of arms for a four-armed, ten-foot soldier is a thing of beauty) . . . [and] grip straightforward action lovers." Publishers Weekly"Coauthors Weber and Ringo excel in depicting the lives and times of soldiers both on and off the battlefield." Library Journal

    Assigned the task of blazing man's first trail into that great unknown, Captain Eric Weston and the crew of the NAC Odyssey launch on a mission destined to make history.Past the bounds of comfort, they encounter horrors and wonders beyond their imagining, with people and monsters beyond reckoning.Odyssey One is the first voyage of the NAC Odyssey and its crew, and the beginnings of a Military Science Fiction Epic that combines both old school space opera, and modern storytelling in one great, exhilarating adventure.Odyssey One is a 150,000 word novel.

    The problem: there are a finite number of Waypoint nodes—and the burgeoning population of humans is hemmed in as a result. Furthermore, humanity is divided into contending Starstates. One of the strongest is based on an oligarchy ruling families, but still mostly democratic. The other is a totalitarian nightmare. War seems inevitable. Now a new Waypoint appears. Might it lead to the long-lost creators of the Waywork? If so, there may be knowledge and technology that will tip the balance in the coming war.  Three people race to make it to the new Waypoint—and beyond. These include Wyodreth Antagean, the reluctant son of an interstellar shipping magnate, Lady Garsina Oswight, the daring daughter of a royal family, and Zuri Mikton, a disgraced flag officer seeking redemption. They are facing an implacable foe in Golsubril Vex, a merciless, but highly effective, autocrat from the Waywork’s most brutal regime. Vex is determined to control the new Waypoint and whatever revelation or power lies on the other side.  Now humanity’s fate—to live in freedom or endless dictatorship—depends on just what that revelation might be.  And who gets there first. About A Star-Wheeled Sky: “. . . offers a fresh take on interstellar conflict. . . .Torgersen provides a fast-paced, exciting adventure, pitting two determined and capable opponents against each other. . . . marvelous science fiction entertainment.”—Daily News of Galveston County About Chaplain's War: "Torgersen mixes the spiritual aspects of the book with subtlety, integrating questions about God and faith into the story organically. The result is thought provoking questions arising as part of an entertaining story . . . Torgersen [also] doesn't shy away from conflict, violence, or space battles."—Futures Past and Present "Solid hard SF with the frisson of well thought through action. Much to enjoy!"—Gregory Benford, multiple Nebula award-winning creator of the Galactic Center saga About Brad R. Torgersen: "Brad Torgersen can write something technical and complex, yet still give it real emotional depth. He's one of the most talented authors I've ever read."—Larry Correia "Brad R. Torgersen shows why he's going to be a power in this field for years to come."—Mike Resnick "Brad Torgersen is a writer who's done a lot and come up the hard way... and the depth of his writing shows it, especially in understanding the nuts and bolts of technology and the souls of those who use it." —L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

     Gedri is one of the star systems in the Silstrand Alliance…sort of. Controlled by several crime syndicates, most of what goes on in there is the opposite of legal. The Silstrand Alliance government stays out of the system as much as possible, only intervening when things really fall apart. That makes it the right sort of place to disappear in, or to make a quick buck. Kylie Roads wants both. She makes her living salvaging abandoned ships left over from pirate attacks on the edges of the system—Gedri has its fair share of pirates too. Some of the hulls are legal, most aren’t. When a salvage job goes bad, Kylie finds herself on the opposite end of a gun. Holding that gun? Silstrand Alliance military, the very people that Kylie wants to avoid. Accused of attacking the ship they are salvaging, Kylie makes a deal to go deep into the Gedri System on a rescue mission—it should be simple, in Gedri, nothing is as simple as it looks. With her ex as the military liaison, Kylie takes her crew on the most dangerous mission of their lives. Rescue the girl, defeat the crime syndicates, and pray the military holds up their end of the bargain.