Ripped of her neuroenhancements and left to die, Anne Demming has lost her skills and her memory. The medcenter where she wakes up is succumbing to violence in the city outside, and the planet is in chaos. It is a crisis she may have caused on the most valuable planet in the star system. Q-7 is the only known source of a rare element expected to power a New World of advanced technology. And while the people of Q-7 starve, Trade Council allies are coming to take the prize . . . at any cost. Caught in the crossfire, the renegade Talon and his garrison of mercenaries find themselves fighting for their survival. Talon will finish what others started - any way he can.
Ripped of her neuroenhancements and left to die, Anne Demming has lost her skills and her memory. The medcenter where she wakes up is succumbing to violence in the city outside, and the planet is in chaos. It is a crisis she may have caused on the most valuable planet in the star system. Q-7 is the only known source of a rare element expected to power a New World of advanced technology. And while the people of Q-7 starve, Trade Council allies are coming to take the prize . . . at any cost. Caught in the crossfire, the renegade Talon and his garrison of mercenaries find themselves fighting for their survival. Talon will finish what others started - any way he can.
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I dreamed of stars collapsing, shock waves, worlds on fire.
Days or weeks I slept, with those dreams howling in my head. The sleep was a long, long death. And at the end, there was pain instead of peace.
I woke up screaming the first time.
Someone airjetted chemicals into a vein; I slept again. More of the known universe went nova, achieved infinite density, or blew apart in fission reactions.
And a black hole began growing.
The next time, they didnât let me wake up until they were ready for me.
I was in and out for several days. I knew I was in a medcenter, knew I was gravely damaged, hoped to die soon, but I donât remember any of it. Those early days are a blaze of agony. I may have had surgeries without anesthetic. If so, it didnât didnât matter at the time.
The first certain memory I have is this: an ugly voice calling me by a name I didnât recognize. Later, there was an ugly face to go with the voice. Both were badly out of focus. The face wore goggles, and the voice called me âChief Demming.â
For just a second, I saw him in sharp focus. His eyes were frightening behind the old-fashioned lenses, mud-colored and angry.
He hates me. I felt it as clearly as if he had shouted at me. He feels sorry for me, but he hates me.
He faded out. It was a mercy. He was no pleasure to look upon, that one. Nor to listen to, with his muddy voice droning âChief Demming.â The inferno I slept in came as a relief.
Later, I think it may have been in the night, a team of them came and did technical things with my body. Tests, probably. I wasnât in close touch with my body at the time, so I didnât care. I recall a smell like burned plastic. It didnât hurt; the pain was all inside my skull.
The next day, or the next, the ugly one came back. âHereâs the Chief,â he said, in a voice like sludge. âLo, how the mighty are fallen.â
I had a dim throb of memory, the feel of his angry eyes hating me. I turned my head so I wouldnât have to look at him.
âLook at that neoplex.â It was a womanâs voice, muted by horror. âTrashed.â
âNeural net, too. Have a look.â
âMy god...â
âSloppy work, isnât it? Even for a street vampire. Must have been in a hell of a hurry.â
âA vampire did this?â
Sneaking admiration for the vampire. Then a quick flush of guilt. Confusion, as the healer struggles with the vigilante. I eavesdropped on the inner battle, not knowing how I heard it. This is a patient, a victim, I hear her telling herself. She canât canât make herself believe it, though.
âItâs awful.â She says it too assertively.
âYeah,â ,â the ugly one agrees, in a tone like a shrug.
Â
Others came and went. I was having trouble with time and space, and the basics were beyond me for a while. Reality went as sticky and stretchy as burned plastic. The people who bustled in and out were mainly techs. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and programmers, all caught up in whatever they were fixing. The only pictures I got from them looked like schematics.
Another airjet straightened me out. The chemical blew through my mind like an ice-cold wind, making everything clear and sharp. I didnât know what any of it meant, but it was wonderfully focused. They let me enjoy it for half an hour before they sent in the Administrator. She was middle-aged, overweight, and carried an expensive keyboard. This, presumably, was the person theyâd theyâd sobered me up to meet.
Self-importance. Disdain. A hundred procedural details to oversee. It trailed into the room behind her like a musty perfume. Much too busy for personal contact with patients, normally. But this was not a normal patient.
She called me âChief Demming,â too. She unlimbered the keyboard like a gunslinger clearing leather and flicked in a few codes as if chambering fresh rounds.
âWeâve notified your family,â she told me brusquely. âIt went out on the net, anyway. We didnât get a confirm from the other end, but message traffic has been disrupted. The riots, you know. Itâs timed to retransmit every two hours, though, so confidence is high. Weâre hoping the Admiral will consent to a credit transfer that we can draw against for your treatment here. Creditâs frozen here for the duration, as Iâm sure youâre aware.â
I wasnât. I didnât even try to make sense of her little speech; I was reading the force behind it. That came through in heavy graphics, text and subtext. She wants to throw me out of here while Iâm sick and weak. So whateverâs out there in the streets (chaos, violence) will tear me apart while I canât fight back. She already has a sugary speech ready for the Admiral. Brain-damaged, she will say. Not responsible. Such a tragedy. We do our best, but most of these cases are uncontrollable in the final stages...
I wondered if all this meant that I was dying. I wondered, too, who the Admiral was and why he had to be appeased. If he frightened people like her, I thought, he must be a monster.
âDo you hear me?â
Much better than she knew. But I couldnât tell her that. I was frozen in a cold wind, and I couldnât even move. Sometimes clarity is no blessing.
âHave you had speech therapy? Arenât you in rehab?â
She didnât wait long for the answers. Holstering her keyboard in disgust, she powered out of the room.
She hasnât got time for this. They should have had me verbal by now, talking, pleading, even begging. Have to get somebody on it right away. There was no satisfaction in it if I just sat there like a vegetable.
Perhaps therapists were in short supply. It took them several days to come up with one. He was young and beefy, but his hair was already thinning. His fingers were very long, dangling from bony wrists, his arms covered with a thick pelt of curly black hair.
Biology can be so unfair.
He had pictures we played with. Cat, woman, house, tree. I counted to ten for him and recognized letters and colors. When we had established my kindergarten skills, he mixed it up a little and the test became more interesting.
âAnd this?â
âOmega. Last character in the Greek alphabet.â Saying that, I realized that I could have repeated it in Greek for him if he had asked. I didnât do it. I was beginning to read more than his cue cards, although I was trying to ignore it.
âThis?â
âThe constellation Kefir.â
âWhatâs your credit account number?â
âI donât know. Do I have one?â
âAnd this one?â
âItâs a stallion, having intercourse with a mare.â
âYour home address?â
â27 Council Row.â
Pause. âWhereâs that?â
âHigh Kensington. On Nova Mundi.â
âAnd your service number?â
âI donât know. Do I have one?â
Concentrating was harder. It came through, that background noise, drowning out his random questions. He always gets the ones nobody else wants. They take advantage of him. He resents it, but he wonât do anything about it because he likes resenting them. He canât stand to look at me and feels wretchedly sorry for himself.
âHow old are you?â
That was a good question. I didnât know. The first number that flashed into my headache was 15, but I knew that was impossible. âIâm not sure,â I said slowly. âI must be very old. Am I?â
âWhat was your motherâs name?â
ââMum.â
My god. Fried; completely shorted out. Should give this one to the janitors, but they canât, so guess who they send? Who else?
âWho is First Citizen on Council?â
âI donât know what that is.â.â
âWhatâs this?â
âA disruptor. No, wait. Wait. Tell me something. Why does everybody here hate me?â
He looked down at the hand monitor, where heâd made his notes. I could feel him thinking, Why me? Why do I always get the really bad ones?
âWell,â he said, after a long time, âthis is where Special Forces sends people after interrogation. Weâve all had to treat them afterward. It hasnât been any picnic, cleaning up after you.â
He snapped the monitor shut, picked up his pictures, left, and didnât come back.
I was still clear and lucid when they sent another tech with an airjet injector. I wasnât in the mood. The pain was endurable at the time. I was troubled, and I wanted to think. I didnât want the world melting again until Iâd had some time to sort things out. I shook my head at the tech.
He paid no attention. âOh, this is great stuff,â he said cheerfully, loading a vial into the barrel of the injector. âWish theyâd give it to me.â
The good cheer was an act. He was thinking, Take it the easy way, or get it the hard way. Itâs all the same to me, pig. He smiled and reached for me.
I tried to move and couldnât. I was as weak as a baby; nothing was working very well. But I was angry. If I had been a snake, I would have buried my fangs in his throat until his face turned black.
âBack,â I hissed at him, glaring. âGet back.â
My voice shocked me. Strong, sibilant, dangerous. The sound a striking serpent would make if it could speak. It shocked the tech, too. He dropped the airjet and bolted from the room.
I think I was more surprised than he was. It left me with a few extra things to wonder about. Like when the medstaff would get around to retaliation. And whether this was a symptom of being uncontrollable. In the final stages.
On the floor, the vial had separated from the airjet and split down one side. A syrupy liquid was leaking out of it, giving off a faint mist as it came in contact with the air. I decided to live in my headache.
Â
For two days, or maybe five, no one came into my room while I was awake. The monitors must have told a central desk when I was in delta sleep, and they must have brought in food while I was out. Sometimes there was no food for a long time.
I doubt if they drugged me. The pain was staggering: nerve-pain, in my skull where there were no nerves. The first day was very bad. I remember screaming like a banshee, although Iâm not sure if I did. The shrieking may have been only in my head. A chorus of other screams echoed me, or that may have been inside my head, too. No one heard. No one came. It could be they were waiting for me to go mad with the pain and beg for more syrup.
In the few days that followed, I learned to control it a little. Back, I whispered, with all the venom I could gather, get back. My killing headache responded, just as the medtech had, though not with the same lightning reflexes. Back off. And it receded, snarling, to a corner of my brain. Confined there, tooth and claw, it did some damage, but at least I could use the rest of my mind for thinking. And trying to remember.
I spent most of my time wandering through my memory, feeling like a tourist in a ghost town. The oldest memories were clearest. The recent ones were buried in debris, too mangled to make out. I could, for example, remember my mother very wellâas she had been when I was a child. Sometimes she would sing to me, usually while doing something else, but she rarely laughed. She had a lovely, lyrical voice. I have total recall of it, and I can remember all the words to her songs, Chinese, English, French, and Common Standard.
Her name was Alanna. In my earliest memories, she is there like a monolith casting a small shadow: me. She had known me better than I did, would sometimes look down at me with her gold eyes and answer my questions before I learned how to ask them. She worked in research, possibly medical research. Ambitious, driven, always busy. Later, I have a vague impression of frantic behavior and obsession, but the memory isnât clear. Perhaps she, too, was uncontrollable in the final stages. If she died I donât remember it, but if she still lives I donât know where or in what condition.
I remember attending school escorted by bodyguards, which Iâd Iâd found embarrassing. I spoke at least five languages. I had studied many subjects but recalled liking only history. I did not remember the Admiral, this planet, or Chief Demming. The gap was frightening, unbridgeable.
I found tiny skin-welded scars behind my ears and down the back of my neck. I guessed that these were for implants of some kind, but if I had special enhancements, none of them were working. I moved around in my own mind, feeling like an alien there. The topography was all wrong. It seemed barren and abandoned, as if no one lived there.
I fell asleep in that desolate place. The dreams of stellar violence were becoming familiar now, and the headache that came with them.
In the morning, they came back. It was the Administrator, with a VIP. I was tired from not sleeping all night, tired of holding the relentless headache at bay, tired of touring the town where nobody lived. When they came in, I was just lying still, zoned.
They talked to me. I didnât try to make sense of it. My attention was elsewhere; I was breathing, and it took a lot of concentration to keep doing it. But while they were talking, I caught a feeling of elation, and it made me curious. It certainly wasnât mine. No one had come into my room carrying an airjet charge of happiness. I wondered what had cheered them up and whether I was to die soon.
Back, I repeated. Get back, get off, get out. It didnât work as well as it had yesterday. But the pain scaled down, just enough for me to listen to them, with my internal pickup amplifying what they did not say. Audio in: they set a time and came together. Neither of them wants to be alone in a room with me. Safety in numbersâtwo others outside the door. Airjets loaded with something drastic. Lethal?
But I couldnât get that. Their thoughts moved on, now coming with more medical technobabble. Wondering if Iâm catatonic. Zipping through the data on the monitor readouts. No, Iâm not catatonic.
Just tired. I could have told them that.
âCan you hear me?â
âI can hear you.â I meant to sound menacing, and I must have. Both of them backed up a step toward the foot of the bed.
âWell, as I was sayingââ He went on saying it. The man had an air of command I recognized at once. King Frog, no doubt, here in the medical pond. If he was, I thought he had a lot to answer for. Besides that, I just didnât like him. He was too happy underneath.
ââand my colleague here has just confirmed the transfer, so thereâs no problem with sending you on to private care. Not until youâre recovered, of course, butââ
âQuestion.â
âYes, certainly. What is it?â
âFrom what, exactly, am I recovering?â
âOh, from...Why, from an assault. Street vampires, I understand. Naturally, thereâs nothing we can do about the electronic side of it. This is a biotic institution; we care only for the natural body. Youâd have to go to the gray market people for hardware repairs, and thatâs up to you. But the first order of business is to see you through biorecovery.â
âWhat does that involve?â
He didnât answer me right away. He wasnât used to being questioned and didnât respond to it with any enthusiasm. âNormally, it involves corrective surgery, rehab, psychotherapy, support groups.â He shrugged dismissively.
âHave I had corrective surgery?â
He glanced at his companion. âUh, yes, I believe some surgical intervention was necessary in your case. At first. But all indicators are that youâre healing very quickly, soââ
âWhat about the rest of it? Rehab, therapy, whatever else you said.â
âWell. Our staff is a bit overtaxed just now. The riots are getting worse every day, and we arenât really set up to cope with civil disorder.â
Losing staff, people not showing up for scheduled shifts. Morgue overflowing. The echoes I got from him were a little scary, though he didnât didnât seem worried.
The Administrator murmured, âAdmissions are up five hundred and fifty percent.â
âYes,â he agreed seriously. âWeâre stretched impossibly thin. And as for referring you to a support groupââ He broke off, smiling a helpless, smug sort of smile.
I didnât have to reach to get at what was in back of that smile. Heâs imagining me in a support group. He thinks theyâd lynch me in the first ten minutes. Not very supportive of him, to smile.
âContraindicated,â the Administrator said, âaccording to the attending physician.â
âWhat attending physician? Is this someone Iâm supposed to have met?â
A nasty silence followed my question. When the VIP spoke again, he was stern and businesslike. âWeâre referring you to private care. Itâs expensive, but we think your situation warrants it. And now that your father has pulled off the credit transfer, you should have more than enough to cover outpatient treatment. Even after youâve settled with us.â
That, I thought, must explain their elation. A cargo load of cash had just parked where they could get at it. The Admiral had come through. âMy father, did you say? The Admiral?â
âYes,â the woman answered. She sounded as though she had just eaten a chocolate bar. âHe managed to override the interdict on credit movement. He sent you a message, too.â
âCoded, or in clear?â
Now, where did that come from, I wondered, so surprised at myself I nearly missed her reply.
âItâitâwasnât coded.â
âIâd like a hard copy.â
Since I canât download it, was the other half of the thought. Another surprise. But I smiled, for the first time. I had made her stammer.
After she gave me the hard copy, I stopped listening, and I donât remember when they left. As soon as I had the thing in my hand, my smile died, and my nerve failed. I didnât have the strength to read it. Hell, I wasnât even sure I could read.
I think I was afraid of the thing because it was my first contact with someone who knew me. If my family hated me as much as everyone else seemed to, recovering might not be a good idea. It didnât seem worthwhile if it was going to be not just painful but pointless. I already had doubts on that score. And I had a bad feeling, somewhere deep, about the Admiral. The father I couldnât remember.
I took the cowardâs way out and fell asleep. I awoke sharing my skull with a shredding pain, and by the time I subdued it, I was sweating and shaking from the struggle. Screams reverberated in my head, although I wasnât wasnât screaming. Other patients? Am I in a psych ward?
Reasoning that I couldnât feel much worse, I picked up the hard copy and read it.
So, yes, I could read Common Standard.
Â
âDDemi: ,â Â it went, âAm making xfer of enough cr to buy you out of situ on Q-7. Suggest you xship on 1st out-sys flight avail. Urgent. Alert. Repeat. Get off Q-7, immediate. Orders cut. Cr follows. Â Return N. M., rsvp if able, priority 1 comm.
â
Not all of it made sense to me, but the basic message was clear: Get out, right now. I thought N. M. might stand for Nova Mundi, and if it did, I was in more trouble than I could handle. If he wanted me to return there, then I must be somewhere else. If I wasnât on Nova Mundi, then I could be anywhere. Even Q-7. Wherever that might be.
Late in the afternoon, I got out of bed. The whole adventure took maybe an hour before I was finally off the mattress and standing on my feet. Even then, I couldnât stand on my own; I had to cling to an equipment pole. It looked like a coat rack, but it sprouted monitors, plumbing apparatus, feed lines, and castors. I rolled it toward the bathroom, shuffling along behind and holding on for dear life.
I had been thinking about genetic engineering and the skin-welds on my head. Below my ear, I had discovered several tiny nodes under the skin. They were probably not visible, but I could feel them. They didnât feel natural.
I decided to have a look. Then I spent the next hour and a half trying to cross seven meters of tiled floor. Mirror, mirror, I thought, panting. Almost there. Who is this Demming-thing, that a support group would lynch it? Will I turn to stone if I look?
I didnât, but I almost passed out. The first glimpse was a shock; I had to grab the edge of the sink to keep from falling. I heard a high-pitched noise inside my head. I donât know how long it took for things to clear up again. I think I just stared in shock for what seemed like a long time.
Face, I kept thinking. Face. It meant something. It was a joke, maybe, and not a nice one. This face canât canât be natural, I thought, searching its flawless planes. It looks like some kind of sculpture. Genetically engineered? Has to be. Simple heredity doesnât doesnât pay this much attention to detail. Who was the engineer who came up with this thing? Was that the Admiral? It cost someone half a world to create it. And how was that massive investment supposed to pay off? It doesnât doesnât make sense. Just to make a sculpture only good for parking in an antiquities museum, alongside forgotten gods and goddesses.
The face looking back at me from the mirror was a fantasy. Eyes the color of ancient gold, soft, lustrous, framed by a sweep of honey-colored lashes. The mouth was made of sinuous lines that relaxed naturally into a provocative smile. The hair was a tumble of swirls the color of polished oak. It even had the look of wood grain, shading from sunlight to crimson to sienna and through all the hues in between. What I could see of the body beneath the hospital shroud was as richly modeled as the rest. And all of it, eyes, skin, hair, and aura: golden.
This is me? Â I thought. It canât canât be. I hate it.
The face stared back at me, as lovely as a bronze casting. A satyrâs satyrâs dream, I thought acidly. How wonderful. I tried to imagine how they did it, collecting DNA from diverse sources, splicing and erasing, testing and evaluating. Building this Galatea in goldtone, to specs provided. But provided by whom? Some guy with too many credits in the net, too much libido, and no taste. I had never seen a woman who looked like this. I suppose I didnât care for the type. The idea of living inside that sensual confection, that thing, revolted me. The face only stared back, serene as a statue, smiling its archaic smile.
It had bruises. I noticed, looking closer, that they were on the sides of the face and would fit a pair of hands holding the head still by main force. Just in front of the hairline on the left, the golden skin had been broken, and no repairs done. There was still some swelling. Holding onto the sink with one hand, I raised the other and pushed the curly mass of hair aside. None of the scars under my fingertips were visible. But a piece had been torn from the perfectly formed little golden ear; it looked like a chipped teacup. Also not repaired. Deeper in the shell of that same ear, a small gold circle was embedded. An eye with a tiny black iris. No. A port, for interface with an external device?? Â Solid gold, smaller than any I had ever seen, made for megadecks I couldnât even imagine, but still, just a port. The rim of it was crusted with dried blood.
Thereâs Thereâs some serious hardware under that skull, I thought. And none of it was working. Somebody has crashed your system, lady, and deleted most of your brain while they were at it.
The gold eyes looked back at me, expressionless. And for just a second, I read her, as clearly as if she had been a stranger in the street. Lost, it came. Lost and alone. The last survivor in a ghost town. A schizophrenic moment; it shook me. The headache came back roaring.
Through it, somehow above it, I sensed an intruder. He was somewhere in the hallways outside, with ââDemmingâ clear in his mind. Looking for me. Where is she? Where have they taken her?? Â He had a weapon in his hand, deep in a pocket. I couldnât tell what it was, maybe a hand laser. Whatever it was, it was in his mind that the safety was off, and he was ready to use it any moment.
Someone was hunting me. I couldnât do anything about it, so I sat down on the tile floor and waited, wondering what would happen now.
Â
I came to on the tile floor, freezing cold and aching with hunger. Most of my medical leads and monitor connectors had pulled loose in the fall, and the equipment pole was leaning crazily against the shower stall. Working slowly with numb fingers, I disconnected the stuff that was still tapped in.
Later, I reacquainted myself with the basic uses of a bathroom and went back to bed. The return trip took much longer than the outbound foray. I covered some of the distance on my hands and knees, and I think I fainted several more times. No intruder stalked my progress. The room was empty.
I slept. I dreamed of stars collapsing. The black hole ate whole galaxies in slow motion. If the assassin had come back, he could have murdered me in my bed almost anytime during the next fifteen hours. I slept that long.
I did awaken once, not for long. I was rocked out of sleep by a loud explosion. The after-echo went on and on. The building shivered. High winds moaned through the streets below, but only for a minute. I closed my eyes, not sure if the blast was real. Went back to sleep.
 No one bothered me with administrative details, food, or homicide.
In the morning, I found an in-house commlink and got someone to answer it after repeated tries.
âI want a ship off-planet.â
âYou want what? Who is this?â
âDemming. I want to get on a flight out of here.â
âYouâ? Wait. Hold on.â
Another voice came on, and eventually another. âI realize youâve been isolated, up there,â the third one said, âbut a lot has gone on in the last week or so. The Port Authority is under siege, and someone has taken over the docking facility. Thereâs still fighting, down along the landing pads.â
âI donât care. I have to get a ship out of here.â
âYou canât.â The voice snapped. âDonât you understand? You canât get near the port, and even if you could, there arenât any ships. Everything in port has been blown to pieces; the wreckage is still burning. Canât you see the smoke from your window? Now please clear this link. We have a lot of comm traffic to take care of. Iâll send a code to your attending, and somebody will get back to you.â
âI doubt that,â I said, but he had already switched off.
But somebody did come. When he walked into my room, he was not much taller than me but older. He was dressed in a lab coat, carried a keyboard, and walked with a doctorâs confident shuffle. I wondered whether this was my long-lost attending physician. I scanned for a deeper sense of him and received nothing. He might as well have been an empty packing crate or a patch of space out beyond the icy stars; he was a void. He closed the door to my room and locked it. He blurred when he did that, seemed to flicker in and out for a second. I couldnât decide whether it was my mind playing tricks or if he was melting.
As he turned around to face me, his outline elongated and resolved. He was clear now: tall and spare. The lab coat was gone. He was dressed in a slash of black, possibly armored. The keyboard had turned into a disruptor, very like the one my therapist had shown me in a picture.
âHi, Face,â he said.
âHello.â
I was still stretching into that chill behind his eyes, looking for answers. I found nothing. He advanced, cat-footed, across the tile floor I knew so well, his weapon pointed casually down and away. I realized that if he wanted to kill me, he was going to do it. And that if he didnât, I would have to get my answers the hard way, by asking questions.
He approached the window obliquely so that no one could see him from the outside and snapped the blinds closed. Leaning negligently against the sill, he watched me for a few long minutes. Then he spoke quietly.
âIâve come to take you home.â
There are several fine lines that really good science fiction authors have to learn to ride. How much do they outright explain? How much of their world, its technology, linguistic quirks, cultural conflicts, and character motivations do they outright define, and how much can they trust reader intuition? Where is the line between trusting your audience, and expecting your audience to read your mind? What absolutely needs to be introduced in this book, and what can be left out and explored in further entries into the series instead?
Some authors learn this many-handed balancing act through practice, some never learn it, and some, like Zan Zastrow in her debut Talon, AD: Epitaph for a Planet, come out of the gate pitch-perfect.
In the first chapter readers are introduced to our protagonist in the aftermath of a traumatic brain injury of epically intimate proportions, one that has left them with only the vaguest sense of self and an ability to hear the thoughts of those surrounding her. As the chapters pass, we learn who our protagonist is, what happened to her mind and memory, and who and what she was in the past, all alongside said protagonist, and all within the claustrophobia of her first-person narrative.
Our protagonist is not comfortable in her own mind or body, and living there with her is not always an easy experience, but man is it enthralling. Cities are burning, riots and mobs abound, a mercenary warlord who may or may not be trustworthy (and a figure from the protagonistâs past), and a growing team of friends, allies, and followers are all eating up time and energy and space in our mutilated heroineâs brain and watching her cope, learn, rage, and cope again is one of the most captivating experiences Iâve had with science fiction in recent memory.
Epic in scope, and yet intimate in scale, there is so much that I want to say about Talon, AD, and yet canât because doing so would invite in spoilers and readers, this is one you do not want spoiled.
Reminiscent of some of past generationâs space epics (think Herbert and Asimov) but with a distinct and absolutely intoxicating flare all its own, Talon, AD marks the first entry into a wild new interplanetary adventure, and this reader is happy to be along for the ride!