CEMENTOPOLIS - Van Ledyard

The called themselves hatchlings, genomic trash, chicks from the DARPA henhouses. The black humor masked the hard reality that the super soldiers created at the federal government's Eau Claire Project and other black sites were now unexpectedly timing out. They faced certain -- and a grisly -- disintegration.

Trevelyan Moss, an Eau Claire "graduate" and a veteran of the serial wars in the western Pacific, is sent to the Navy's Cyberwarfare outfit in Souda Bay where he meets Nepheli, the math whiz and Cretan beauty.

Moss takes an express discharge from the Navy. He will go undercover in New Racine, the half finished smart city on the shores of Lake Michigan, to take down a renegade oligarch terrorizing much of the Midwest with a fleet of driverless bomb cars called Weevils. Moss talks Nepheli into joining him along with Marcus, her teenaged son. Desperate for a new start, she agrees to go. But she's frustrated and mystified at how little she knows about Moss' background and his reluctance to talk about his family.

The undercover work gets Moss close to Eau Claire. And maybe - how exactly he doesn't know -- he can begin to find some answers, make some connections, find some genomic clue that will make him whole.

Nothing seems to stop Moss. Not Bad Axe Security, the oligarch's brutal private police. Not the warring gangs in New Racine's no-go zones. Not even double-crossing Col. Mac McKelvey, the man who had mentored Moss - controlled really - since Eau Claire days.

And it all goes horribly wrong.

Ah the smell of electric vehicle fires in the morning! In New Racine, the future ain't what it used to be.