This is a new author via a book request which is great! This book is outside my usual “military” science fiction book reviews, although it has a lot of action involving the military and other actors. Our main guy is police Captain Jon Diaz on duty in the Los Angeles area. He goes to work on morning only to be alerted to a bank robbery in progress. While he doesn’t normally respond to these calls, he’s in the area and due to the nature of the call, he decides to go see what’s going on. Little did he know this was going to change his entire life.
On the scene of the bank robbery, Captain Diaz sees four men fleeing from the bank. They are moving fast, very fast, in fact, that are moving much faster than any human should. They have already killed four bank guards and don’t seem to care whether they kill more people or not. Jon decides to follow them and engage with his own weapons to try and stop them from leaving the area. He isn’t successful since they can move quicker than he can follow. They jump from one stolen vehicle to another and are soon gone from the area.
Back at his HQ, Captain Diaz learns that these bank robberies have been happening way to frequently by the same four guys. He believes these guys are “humanoids” which is a new term for men or women who have been given artificial limbs (legs, arms or both) due to some previous injuries. Unfortunately, most of these amputees where at one time, combat veterans and a lot of them came from the Russian War. All the military powers had developed deadly laser weapons which could sever arms and legs while cauterizing the wound leaving a gravely injured solider who didn’t then die out from blood loss unless he had other injuries. This resulted in lots of service members getting advanced prosthesis which include a brain implanted control chip that allowed them to control their artificial limbs almost like their former natural limbs.
This was a great improvement in the lives of the many veterans coming back from the war. They could now hold decent jobs and do the work they would have formerly been able to do, that is until something started to go wrong withe the brain chip. It sometimes drove the normally sane individuals insane and terribly dangerous to those around him or her. This defect was occurring way to often and people were getting very scare of having these “humanoids” around. That term was just a gentler reminder that these people were really cyborgs and everyone knows how dangerous they can be.
So, the government was getting ready to step in and start controlling these “humanoids”, especially now that someone has turned them into super humanoids or hypernoids! I didn’t make this up, blame that on the author! Even the President of the United States was now involved in “controlling” these humanoids by restricting their rights and other such things which effectively made them second-class citizens.
Now, back to Captain Diaz. He’s right in the middle of Sector 11 area as it’s in Los Angeles. He’s told that since his office can’t seem to do anything about these bank robberies and the hypernoids, the President is sending a three-star General Thaddeus Thurmond to take charge in preparation for a presidential visit to the area. Captain Diaz will have to work under the General and that’s where all his problems start. Jon is soon going to see the other side of this story with the humanoids. How he does that is pretty gruesome, but someone needs to stand-up for these people.
This is a pretty interesting book with a lot of interesting ideas. I’m not so sure that a Lieutenant General (three-star) would be running around like he’s portrayed in this book, but that’s the authors prerogative. Also, I’m not an expert on police ranks, but I don’t think a police Captain would be out chasing bank robbers, but I could be wrong. The editing in the book is OK, but could be done better, seemed to be a missing words here and there.
Again, this wasn’t my normal military type science fiction book, but there certainly is enough fighting and military stuff going on to keep you interested.