Night Soldiers

Night Soldiers, Peter Tuscarora, PublishAmerica, 2005

Set in the near future, Earth has been taken over by capitalism. Countries have become economic zones. There are lots of Little-Rich left, like entertainers and sports stars, but the world is run by five Super-Rich people, called Capitalists. Individually worth trillions of dollars, they each run a specific part of the world. Within their areas, they exert absolute control, and there is constant battle with the other four Capitalists. Techno-military updates occur at a furious pace, as each works to make sure that they are not the next to fall.

The world has experienced five Money Wars, to reduce the number of Capitalists to its present level. Those on the outside may not know that anything is happening, but, for those on the inside, they are short and brutal. A Capitalist's net worth can drop by tens of billions of dollars in minutes. One of the Capitalists falls, and is captured. Instead of being executed, she is intentionally kept alive so she can be tortured over and over.

Much of this happens because of mercenaries called Night Soldiers. Loyal to whichever of the Capitalists offers the biggest paycheck, they get rid of the "undesirables" (whatever that means). Quincy is one of them. He has a bit of humanity left in him (concepts like love and God, anything that doesn't involve money, are considered Old World, and have been thrown in the proverbial trashcan). He understands that Money Wars are going to continue until there is only one Capitalist left, The only group that can stand up to the Capitalists are the Night Soldiers. Meantime, Raskolnikov, another of the Capitalists, on his way down, wreaks ultimate vengeance on the rest of the world.

This book is cool, very plausible, very high-tech and does quite well in the "strange" department. The author says that he has invented a new genre called Extreme Fiction. I would be very interested in anything else he writes in this genre.