Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Technothrillers

It began in Ethiopia, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when a handful of genetic mutations caused evolution to split from the primates and mankind was born. Now, eons later, evidence of more splits from the apes is being unearthed. And with them, a disturbing realization. Ours was only one of many.

Aemilius thought he would die heroically in battle like his forefathers, mourned by a loving wife and many children, but he’s barely a man when a harpy flies down out of the old myths and knocks him from his horse. Stunned and helpless, he waits for his end … and is saved. Formed on the bloody battlefield of Teutoburg, the Hidden Legion are an order of soldiers, magicians, and rogues so secret that the Empire itself would hunt them down if they were exposed. And now Aemilius is one of them.

Inside North Korea, veteran Fourth Echelon agent Sam Fisher finds himself on the run when a top-secret covert mission goes fatally wrong. Betrayed by his allies, hunted by his adversaries, and disavowed by his own agency, Sam is stranded deep inside hostile territory–and his only chance of survival is to uncover a murderous plot that reaches into the heart of the hermit state, and beyond.

Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents’ mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world. Then a car accident changed everything. Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches.

Political and social infighting threaten to destroy the world. Rancor and hatred only grow stronger, engulfing entire nations. And each day moral and economic strife brings embroiled countries ever closer to war. But hope is not dead. Everywhere, pockets of honor and compassion continue to persevere. Where human lives are cherished and valor endures. And one small, extraordinary group fights to save us all. A team in possession of the mother of all secrets. The one secret - the one discovery - that could bring the world back from the brink.

After years of exhaustive negotiations, North Korea's Kim Jong Il abruptly agrees to surrender all of his nuclear weapons. This sudden change in policy has the US suspicious, and the Team is dispatched to uncover the truth. Newest Team operative, the young and beautiful Thera Majed, goes undercover during the preliminary inspections of the entire Korean peninsula, on a mission so sensitive that she will be disavowed if discovered.

When a daring, high-tech CIA operation goes wrong and is disavowed, Michael Dunne sets out for revenge. CIA operations officer Michael Dunne is tasked with infiltrating an Italian news organization that smells like a front for an enemy intelligence service. Headed by an American journalist, the self-styled bandits run a cyber operation unlike anything the CIA has seen before. Fast, slick, and indiscriminate, the group steals secrets from everywhere and anyone, and exploits them in ways the CIA can neither understand nor stop.

Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear has won high praise for her thought-provoking science fiction. The second in Bear’s powerful Jacob’s Ladder series, Chill finds the generation starship Jacob’s Ladder with a new captain—Perceval. As Perceval struggles with the ship’s recent damage, remnants of the rebellion still linger and a threat to the crew grows.

Kira Miller is a brilliant scientist who discovers how to temporarily boost human IQ to dizzying levels. But this transcendent intelligence brings with it a ruthless megalomania. Determined to use her discovery to propel human civilization to a higher plane, despite this side effect, Kira and ex-special forces operative David Desh recruit a small group of accomplished scientists, all of whom are safely off the grid. Or so they think...

In a bid to dominate Asia and the western Pacific, China provokes a military crisis with the United States and then starts shooting down GPS satellites. America has only a short amount of time to devise some way of protecting its remaining satellites or China will gain an enormous advantage in the coming conflict. The only way the satellites can be protected is from orbit, so an armed spacecraft must be quickly designed, built, and launched to fight on this new battlefield.

Older, but not necessarily wiser, Aiden Pearce, “the Fox”, is a rolling stone, surviving by moving from one grey hat hacker job to the next. While in Baltimore, he’s captured by a mysterious agent who insists finding missing cargo full of transhuman tech is something only Pearce can do. When flattery doesn’t work, he’s blackmailed into taking the job. Worse, he’s partnered again with the unscrupulous Jordi Chin.

Mike Mansfield is back, trying to help a grieving family make sense of a terrible tragedy. However, to his surprise, the details of the event don’t entirely make sense, not from the family, the police, nor the official report. Something about the story doesn’t fit, but Mansfield has no idea what it is. All he knows is that someone is watching him, very carefully.

An alien message is now humanity’s only hope. Decoding the signal has given us one chance to stop the Anomaly, an ever-tightening cosmic noose, before it squeezes the life out of Earth. The only problem is, the aliens’ single instruction sounds like a bona fide death wish. They want me to step through their incredible quantum gateway, an enigma wrapped in starlight. Believe me: if I had any other option, I’d be taking it. But with the best data giving Earth a few days before the Anomaly consumes us, options are in short supply. Suicide or salvation? I’m about to find out.

A junior intelligence officer in the Martian Combined Fleet, Radrick Siegn supplements his meager pay by smuggling contraband from Saturn to Mars. Someday, he’ll buy his own ship and escape the Fleet forever. But his captain has other plans for him. A tanker pilot has been murdered on Saturn Station. It’s up to Siegn to salvage the honor of the Fleet by finding the killer … before they kill again. The investigation plunges Siegn into the seedy underworld of Saturn Station, where he learns this was no ordinary killing.

Booklist calls the world of Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear’s spellbinding Jacob’s Ladder series “magnificently populated, well worth visiting.” Here the trilogy that began with Dust and Chill draws to its stunning conclusion. The passengers of the generation spaceship Jacob’s Ladder have found a new home at last. But the planet Grail is already inhabited - and its population of genetically engineered humans has no intention of sharing the world.

The alien creatures have made it to Earth. Entire cities are battling invasion from the menacing swarms. This is worse than Zola. It’s worse than the Leak. It’s worse than all of our nightmares put together. The creatures are indestructible, shrugging off our strongest weaponry. Now, our only hope lies inside a powerful ancient artifact we don’t understand. To save Earth’s future, we have to unlock the secrets of a lost alien past. Whatever it takes, we have to harness the power of the Orb. Humanity is coming together for one last stand against this threat from afar.

Mike Mansfield’s cases are never easy. They’re dangerous and unpredictable, but there are patterns. Patterns in how criminals act and how they think. But this time, something is off. After a recent rescue, the emerging details seem very odd to Mansfield. Of his three culprits, one has no clue who he was working for, the second has no desire to be released from police custody, and the third has vanished altogether. Moreover, the level of sophistication involved in their operation is beyond anything he's seen before, and hints at something much more ominous.

Elias McKay is an Extractionist. As an “Xwire” with a head full of experimental mites, he specializes in pulling minds out of virtual space and getting them back into their bodies intact. He’s one of the best. But he’s fallen on hard times. After getting banned by the government from doing lucrative legal work due to a past indiscretion, McKay picks up shady gigs wherever he can find them. His latest job takes him to Singapore for a quick extraction of a corporate bigwig, but things go from bad to worse when hired muscle, black ops agents, and hackers attack him and his client.

Jing-nan has known Peggy Lee, a bullying frenemy who runs her family's huge corporation, since high school. Peggy's father has been kidnapped, and the ransom the kidnappers are demanding is not money but IP: a high-tech memory chip that they want to sell in China. Jing-nan feels sorry for Peggy until she starts blackmailing him into helping out. Peggy is worried the kidnappers' deadline will pass before the police are able to track down the chip. But when the reluctant Jing-nan tries to help, he finds himself deeper and deeper in trouble with some very unsavory characters.

Hayden Lichfield’s life is ripped apart when he finds his father murdered in their lab, and the camera logs erased. The killer can only have been after one thing: the Sisyphus Formula the two of them developed together, which might one day reverse death itself. Hoping to lure the killer into the open, Hayden steals the research. In the process, he uncovers a recording his father made in the days before his death, and a dying wish: Avenge me.