As twin torpedoes from a renegade Iranian sub streak into the hull of their escort ship, the crew of the Yuduki Maru looks on in horror... Their cargo includes two tons of weapons-grade plutonium. And now, with enough nuke fuel to arm a superpower, an alliance of fanatics threatens to poison a continent. In a daring mission of high-seas heroism, Lt. Blake Murdock leads his seven-man unit from Team Seven's Red Squad into bulkhead-to-bulkhead battle — with high-tech buccaneers who've got nothing left to lose...

“A very many trickster moons ago,” said Tony’s grandfather, “and very, very far away... way past where our real world ends and your imagination begins, things were different than here. There was a proud kingdom that had fallen on darker days.” “The kingdom was known as Iisen, or the Iisendom as it was sometimes called. It was a prosperous and peaceful kingdom, but for years, a cloud had been forming over the land and was worrying the people that lived there.” “People were disappearing... not many, but when they did, it made the people afraid. There were rumors, of course. Rumors of gypsies and monsters in the woods, but no one seemed to know what was happening for sure. And the people of Iisen, the merchants and hostlers and iron mongers and farmers, couldn’t very well hide in their homes and farmhouses. They still had to earn a living. All they could do was hope they weren’t the next to vanish one day.” “But the tale doesn’t really start with that. The tale starts with a thief. A thief who had just been caught and was about to be in very deep trouble...”

Matthew likes his life in Richmond. He has his friends and his softball and his volunteer work. And he has a very good-looking boyfriend, Brian, who he’s been happily dating for over a year now. So what if his friends tend to question just how good his boyfriend is, and so what if Brian tends to have inexplicable mood swings. And so what if Brian seems to invite Matt’s suspicions on occasion. If he just shows a little faith and trust, he’ll appreciate what he has with Brian the way he should. Right? But suddenly, Matt finds himself in a desperate life-or-death situation on a trip overseas, and he realizes just how much he misses home, and Brian. He’s luckily rescued by a team of US Special Forces, only to immediately find out they’re a bunch of bigoted jerks. Worse, a quirk of his situation forces him to spend time with them that he’d rather not. And that’s when he finds out that first impressions can be misleading. When called upon, he steps up when every fiber of his being tells him not to, and discovers something deep inside himself that he didn’t realize was even there. And his life will never be the same. He finds that he can, after all, make some very overdue changes in his own life. What Matt doesn’t realize is that the bond of brotherhood runs both ways. And he winds up changing the lives of several of the men on that Special Forces team as much as they changed his. All it takes is faith and trust.

This anthology includes 120 authors -- who contributed 230 works totaling approximately 1.1 MILLION words of fiction. These pieces all originally appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next generation of speculative storytelling.All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016.  We hope you'll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.

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Cayne, Kristine & Shaw, Sherri & Tisdale, Clare & Russell, Charlotte & Stillings, Marianne & Kravagna, Dawn

While testing a top-secret missile defense system in the middle of the Pacific, the U.S.S. "Jefferson" accidentally targets the Russians. Their retaliation is swift and they have no interest in diplomacy. Now the Carrier Battle Group Fourteen must defend itself without provoking a full-blown war.

A renegade Chinese fighter group invades Thai airspace in an attempt to break the SEATO alliance and shatter the fragile balance of world power. Ordered to stop the trouble before it gets started, the men of Battle Group Fourteen must restore peace before the skies blow wide open.

A new world war has begun. It is the year 2012, and extremists in Germany and South Africa have succeeded in staging simultaneous coups to forge the Berlin-Boer Axis, a cabal determined to take over the world. The key instrument of this war is tactical nuclear weaponry, where a single torpedo or cruise missile can destroy an entire ship or city. And while the war will be fought with high-tech weapons, it will be won or lost by the men who command them… Commander Jeffrey Fuller is America’s newest hero. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his victories in battle as captain of America’s most sophisticated and deadly fast-attack nuclear submarine, the USS Challenger , Fuller takes grim satisfaction in the honor, knowing at what cost it came. But he has barely enough time to receive the decoration before he is tasked with a new mission. An Allied convoy is steaming toward Africa, hoping to establish a beachhead on the continent that would enable a D-day type of invasion. The enemy has dispatched its most lethal submarine, the SMS Admiral von Scheer , a ceramic-hulled sub virtually undetectable by even the most advanced sonar technology, to ensure that the convoy never reaches its destination. Fuller’s mission is to protect the convoy at all costs, even if it means battling the phantom sub to do it. Then a nearly impossible mission gets even more difficult. Fuller discovers from intelligence sources that agents of the Berlin-Boer Axis are attempting to gain a foothold in South America, a development that would force the United States to fight the war on yet another front, an escalating conflict they can’t possibly win. Now Fuller must make a no-win decision: deploy his team of Navy SEALs to South America to destroy the nuclear-armed enemy insurgents or patrol the depths of the Atlantic, seeking threats to the convoy? Even Fuller cannot be in two places at once, and the failure of either mission will mean defeat for the Allied cause. Fuller’s opponents have every technological advantage of modern warfare: nuclear-tipped torpedoes, high-velocity flechette projectiles, and hyper-accurate targeting computers. But a weapon is only as powerful as the man who wields it, and Fuller possesses the intellect, the nerve, and the guts that earned him victories over the most dangerous warriors in the Axis Navy. Stalking his prey beneath the waves where the pressure alone can kill, Commander Jeffrey Fuller knows that while one man’s life may be meaningless, one man’s death could change the course of the war.