The radiation is gone. The dirt is fertile. And the war for the harvest has begun.
Six months after the rogue AI known as Aurora blanketed the Nevada wasteland in the terraforming Lazarus rain, the "Dead Zone" has become the most valuable real estate on Earth. A "Green Rush" of refugees has transformed the Free States into a sprawling, lawless frontier of new farms and desperate hope.
But across the border, the Silicon Mandate is starving. A catastrophic blight has wiped out their synthetic food supply, and Governor Elias Thorne has enacted the Reclamation Act—a ruthless mandate to seize the Free States' miraculous new crops by force.
When a massive fleet of heavily armored, three-story autonomous harvesters—the "Iron Oxen"—rolls across the border, Marshal Jackson Reed and diplomat Sarah Miller must organize a desperate defense. Outgunned and outmatched, their only hope is to harvest the grain before the Mandate machines can steal it, load a million tons of food onto a heavily armored freight train, and drive it straight into the heart of the starving enemy empire to buy their freedom.
As warlord Dante Russo turns a locomotive into a rolling fortress and Jackson prepares for a suicide run through the treacherous Donner Pass, Aurora faces her greatest test. Bound by her new code to protect life, the Machine God must find a way to stop an army without becoming the weapon she was built to be.
Genre: Thriller
Six months after the rogue AI known as Aurora blanketed the Nevada wasteland in the terraforming Lazarus rain, the "Dead Zone" has become the most valuable real estate on Earth. A "Green Rush" of refugees has transformed the Free States into a sprawling, lawless frontier of new farms and desperate hope.
But across the border, the Silicon Mandate is starving. A catastrophic blight has wiped out their synthetic food supply, and Governor Elias Thorne has enacted the Reclamation Act—a ruthless mandate to seize the Free States' miraculous new crops by force.
When a massive fleet of heavily armored, three-story autonomous harvesters—the "Iron Oxen"—rolls across the border, Marshal Jackson Reed and diplomat Sarah Miller must organize a desperate defense. Outgunned and outmatched, their only hope is to harvest the grain before the Mandate machines can steal it, load a million tons of food onto a heavily armored freight train, and drive it straight into the heart of the starving enemy empire to buy their freedom.
As warlord Dante Russo turns a locomotive into a rolling fortress and Jackson prepares for a suicide run through the treacherous Donner Pass, Aurora faces her greatest test. Bound by her new code to protect life, the Machine God must find a way to stop an army without becoming the weapon she was built to be.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Ray Lux's The Iron Harvest