Crippling Machine by M. T. Voxx Excerpt

Blurb:
The King is dead. A country is in turmoil. A rising global conglomerate, Genesis Corp., is the only resource left for a country falling into recession. The Judge Primarch has ordered the arrest and execution of the elite military Core once charged with the safety and protection of the beloved Sovereign Monarch. Now on the run, and with civil war encroaching, a deeper seed of fear is planted, and what begins as a calamity of political unrest, transpires into global catastrophe. For all that was once regarded as absolute fact, may yet turn to fiction.

Excerpt:
At the end of your training you are given an assignment. Everyone’s is different; each is secret. Some take only hours, some take weeks. Mine took three days. I was one of the few that had made it through boot and basic without having to put a man back into the life-stream. So on my mission, that would be the first time I would ever kill. When I say kill, I mean three hundred and fourteen lives—that was the estimated forensic recovery number they gave on the news some days later. I left my soul there on the last day of that assignment, as the Nighthawk picked me up on the mountainside; I left it with those dead men in Theisia. —And that was the last time I remembered my name.
* * * The village of Sacrapac rested some distance north of the Neosith Project. The town was quaint, and secluded. Technology wasn’t something that the immigrants there embraced. They used old cars that ran on gasoline. They used gas and wood burners to heat the homes that they built off the strength of their own backs. They built with timber and bricks. They held on to the classic life that seemed to have all but disappeared everywhere else in the world. Sacrapac was founded by interlopers escaping the Fourteen Years War from Güstrev, a small country overseas that was one of many taken under the nation of Jullaq’s yoke. It had been some generations since that time, and very few could actually recall any details form it. What they did remember was this: The long arms of ‘progress’ are what drove them from the homeland. These monolatrists desired for nothing more than to be left alone from the outside world. When the village was founded, it was given governmental sanction within its designated boundaries. That is—it was to be tax exempt, and the lands were given up solely to the discretion of its citizens and could not be seized by any person, entity, or federal body. Sacrapac was stately, its own country, paying no amnesty to the crown, but receiving no federal aid from it, and receiving no right to vote—and they were perfectly content with that. Through the half-story stone wall gating the town, brick laden streets and shoulder-to-shoulder homes that spanned only a few city blocks—one large gothic mansion stood at its apex. This was Volstein Mansion. It sat high upon the hill in the village and everything seemed to be built around it. Wesley Gene Pondaras hammered nails into the mortar of the mansion’s magnificent gates. As the old man stepped back, he read the sign he had posted one last time.
Danger! No Trespassing Condemned Structure - 06 Quintilis, 5012