Search Worlds Without End

High above the planet Earth, an alien probe appears -- and in an unspeakably horrific instant, releases a deadly blast that strafes the planet's surface, leaving a miles-wide, smoldering crater of destruction in its wake. Millions die in Florida, Cuba, and Venezuela, their lives blotted out in a blazing millisecond.

Just as swiftly, the probe implodes and crashes on the planet surface, but the remnants provide no clue as to its origin. Who are the attackers, and what provoked them?

Aboard the Starship Enterprise, Captain Jonathan Archer learns of the destruction. His ship is called home; it is uncertain whether its mission of space exploration will continue.

But before Enterprise reaches Earth, Archer is abruptly kidnaped from the bridge by the time-traveling enemies he has encountered before. He finds himself aboard a Suliban vessel, face-to-face with his old nemesis, Silik, a high-ranking indiviual in a battle known only as the Temporal Cold War. Silik leads him to his master, a mysterious humanoid from the far future.

The humanoid claims that the attack on Earth was just a test; and the next attack will destroy Archer's home planet... unless he and the Enterprise crew stop it.

To do so, they must enter a region of space called The Expanse - an area so dangerous that no ship has ever emerged from it unscathed. Vulcan crews were driven to bloodthirsty madness, Klingon crews were anatomically inverted, their internal organs exposed outside their bodies... while they still lived. Many vessels were lost, never to be heard from again.

Archer faces the greatest crisis of his career: Should he believe Silik's time-traveling master, and expose his ship and crew to the perils of The Expanse, in hopes of saving Earth from destruction? And can he convince Starfleet Command and the Vulcan High Council to let Enterprise go to face her biggest challenge?

The gates have opened the way to a thousand new worlds and the rush to colonise has begun. Settlers looking for a new life stream out from humanity's home planets. Illus, the first human colony on this vast new frontier, is being born in blood and fire.

Independent settlers stand against the overwhelming power of a corporate colony ship with only their determination, courage and the skills learned in the long wars of home. Innocent scientists are slaughtered as they try to survey a new and alien world.

James Holden and the crew of his one small ship are sent to make peace in the midst of war and sense in the heart of chaos. But the more he looks at it, the more Holden thinks the mission was meant to fail.

And the whispers of a dead man remind him that the great galactic civilisation which once stood on this land is gone. And that something killed them.

A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land rush in human history has begun. As wave after wave of colonists leave, the power structures of the old solar system begin to buckle.

Ships are disappearing without a trace. Private armies are being secretly formed. The sole remaining protomolecule sample is stolen. Terrorist attacks previously considered impossible bring the inner planets to their knees. The sins of the past are returning to exact a terrible price.

And as a new human order is struggling to be born in blood and fire, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante must struggle to survive and get back to the only home they have left.

The final war has started. The protomolecule, fairly quiescent since the opening of the gates, has identified its enemy and is arming itself for battle. Humanity is at most a tool in its post-human arsenal. When people, ships, and even places begin to disappear, Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have to face the fact that the thing they've been hauling through the depths of space only appears to be Detective Miller. The time when the protomolecule's agenda and humanity's overlapped has passed.

As the protomolecule takes control of the ancient networks and relays, the final battle begins. Holden and his allies are faced with the decision of whether to blow the gates, trapping humanity in beads of disconnected worlds, or engage in a battle that they can only lose no matter who wins.

A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood.

The Free Navy - a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships - has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them.

James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone. Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinante for a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network.

But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun. As the chaos grows, an alien mystery deepens. Pirate fleets, mutiny, and betrayal may be the least of the Rocinante's problems. And in the uncanny spaces past the ring gates, the choices of a few damaged and desperate people may determine the fate of more than just humanity.

AN OLD ENEMY RETURNS

In the thousand-sun network of humanity's expansion, new colony worlds are struggling to find their way. Every new planet lives on a knife edge between collapse and wonder, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante have their hands more than full keeping the fragile peace.

In the vast space between Earth and Jupiter, the inner planets and belt have formed a tentative and uncertain alliance still haunted by a history of wars and prejudices. On the lost colony world of Laconia, a hidden enemy has a new vision for all of humanity and the power to enforce it.

New technologies clash with old as the history of human conflict returns to its ancient patterns of war and subjugation. But human nature is not the only enemy, and the forces being unleashed have their own price. A price that will change the shape of humanity -- and of the Rocinante -- unexpectedly and forever...

Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper.

In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed, and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable. But the price of that knowledge may be higher than she can pay.

At the heart of the empire, Teresa Duarte prepares to take on the burden of her father's godlike ambition. The sociopathic scientist Paolo Cortázar and the Mephistophelian prisoner James Holden are only two of the dangers in a palace thick with intrigue, but Teresa has a mind of her own and secrets even her father the emperor doesn't guess.

And throughout the wide human empire, the scattered crew of the Rocinante fights a brave rear-guard action against Duarte's authoritarian regime. Memory of the old order falls away, and a future under Laconia's eternal rule -- and with it, a battle that humanity can only lose - seems more and more certain. Because against the terrors that lie between worlds, courage and ambition will not be enough...

For the first time, all of the short fiction set in James S. A. Corey's New York Times bestselling Expanse series is available in this collection--including a brand new novella.

Contents:

• The Butcher of Anderson Station
• Gods of Risk
• Drive
• The Churn
• The Vital Abyss
• Strange Dogs
• Auberon
• The Sins of Our Fathers

This novelette about Solomon Epstein and his invention of the Epstein drive takes place approximately 150 years prior to the main Expanse series, and originally appeared in the anthology Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at SyFy.com.