SETH W. JAMES

Life in the Grey

Cain and Francesca, two of the Orbital Archipelago’s elite soldiers-of-fortune, had anticipated a tedious morning of interviewing prospective clients when an emergency call came in on Cain’s private line.  Paula Cruz, the DMI hacker who had supported Cain on countless scores over the last eight years, had come under attack: Lester Sims, the mob boss with whom she had a protection agreement, had just pulled her aircover and mercenaries were inbound to kidnap her—or worse.  Cain and Francesca immediately set out to follow Paula’s escape vehicle to Earth, where the three fugitives must now run for their lives to evade the pursuing mercs and, ultimately, discover the identity of Paula’s attacker, his purpose, and end the threat—permanently.

From the riotous streets of Texas, to the opulent high-rises of Chicago, to the seediest corners of the archipelago, Cain, Francesca, and Paula must hunt the hunter in this next thrilling novel in The Cain Series.

Logos of Cain

After the events of book 4, The Fall, with Francesca’s now infamous flight from government service, Cain returns with her to the orbital archipelago and to his former life in the commerce in violence.  As Francesca struggles to make peace with the consequences of her choices—and with her new reality as a gun-for-hire—Cain, too, finds himself struggling with reentry issues, as the scores that he had once pulled down no longer satisfy him.

Unwilling to accept the role of expendable, Cain soon demands greater control over how he and Francesca pursue the goals of their corporate, governmental, and criminal employers—and immediately find themselves squaring off against the heaviest marks, from raiding a secret Korean cybernetics laboratory to executing a hit on Gate Station Mars.

As a possible new future together takes shape, however, the past proves restless, as an old adversary of Francesca’s appears with a multilayered scheme to undo all that she had built in her former life.  Cain and Francesca—along with their handpicked mercenary crew—must then swap scores with the archipelago’s most brazen crime lord, to eradicate the despicable, to preserve the indispensable.

The Fall

As global food-scarcity spiraled out of control, the European Seawall Project finally began constructing the massive edifice that would reclaim lands lost to rising sea levels—and upon them build the farms that would avert famine.  The workers laboring to raise the seawall were provided with the very best: fusion-powered exoskeletons, excellent pay, and a perpetually hovering artificial island, where they could enjoy their off-hours near the seawall amid every pleasure and vice money could buy.  Despite the urgency of their work and the joys of life on the island, not everyone was satisfied—and someone had begun sabotaging construction drones.

Francesca Pieralisi, the former prosecutor turned seawall-project director, was then sent in to identify the saboteur and his grievances.  She was not given a free hand to investigate, however, nor authorized to solve whatever problems she discovered, not since Paul Devouard, ESF Chief and her boss, had lost faith in her judgement after the near-disaster of the Bolivian affair.  Barred from official resources, Francesca could only rely upon herself—and Cain.  Calling upon his expertise as an elite soldat de fortune, Cain enlisted the aid of his old criminal network, to cut through the misdirection and outright lies, and to uncover the truth.

Cain and Francesca soon discovered the many forces exploiting the island, from an avaricious drone corp, to corrupt private cops, to a criminal syndicate and its burgeoning underground.  It was not until they began covertly neutralizing these threats, however, that they uncovered the massive conspiracy behind it all—and the atrocity central to its scheme.  To save the seawall and any hope of averting famine, they must now excise the threat with a surgical strike.  But will their desperate action be enough—or too much?

An Uncalculated Risk

In the fusion age, war for commerce had become a commonplace.  But when an unusually well-financed mercenary force seized the Alto Madidi mining complex in the Bolivian Andes, they set off a cascade of events that brought the global tin market to its knees—and threatened Francesca Pieralisi’s seawall project.  Tin was indispensable to the manufacture of construction exoskeletons, called “connies,” and connies were the only means by which the seawall could be built, to reclaim the farmlands that would stave off the looming threat of famine.

To discover who had hired the mercenaries—and to determine if their goal was simply theft or an attack on EU interests—EU INTCEN tasked Francesca (and, with her, Cain) to go to Bolivia and find the truth.  What they found was a plot by the richest man on Earth—or off of it—and a global extortion conspiracy involving bribery, kidnapping, and war.  Francesca, undaunted by the odds, would stop at nothing to save her seawall project, but soon found herself betrayed by her own zeal, manipulated into compromising her reputation and career, and saw her life pushed to the cliff’s edge.

Cain must now fight through a web of off-world, sovereign corporations, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, to make a lie the truth, and to pull Francesca back from oblivion.  From Sovereign Trade Zones in the American South to the rainforests of South America, Cain battles not only to remove the mercenary brigade, but to short-circuit the machinations of a trillionaire in An Uncalculated Risk, book 3 of The Cain Series.

A Desperate Measure

In A Desperate Measure, book 2 of The Cain Series, several months have passed since Cain and Francesca took down the fascist cabal of billionaire Dietrich Stinnes.  Riding the wave of celebrity that her victory had inspired, Francesca stepped down as the Mayor of Venice to join the newly-formed European Seawall Foundation, to shepherd the project she had fought so hard to create, with Cain at her side as her Chief of Security.  What should have been a blissfully dull—though vitally important—assignment soon became as dangerous as any period in their lives, when off-world corporation Black Horizons, Inc. infiltrated the ESF, intent upon diverting a portion of the foundation’s staggering budget to their bottom line—by any means necessary.

Cain must soon return to his roots in corporate crime, to counteract BHI’s attempts to neutralize Francesca.  From circumventing the surveillance-state AI, to battling mercenaries on the streets of Brussels, to hunting corrupt cops through a deserter colony on the Latvian coast, Cain struggles to intercept each new—and increasingly aggressive—threat.  BHI, however, have nothing to lose through violent escalation: they are a sovereign corporation, their orbiting headquarters placing them not only above Earth, but above its laws, as well.

Faced with the crippling effect that BHI’s extortion would have on the seawall project—and with the hundreds of millions who would suffer famine without the new farmlands it would create— Francesca must decide if times have grown desperate enough for a desperate measure.

Ethos of Cain

The perfection of cold fusion and CasiDrive propulsion had lifted humanity into the wider solar system—and widened the gulf between the nameless masses and the sovereign-class wealthy.  Into the grey between corporate and criminal walked Cain, a soldat de fortune, who, for the last twenty years, had taken scores and completed contracts for the elites of any world, impenetrable, abstruse, and solitary.

All of that changed one year ago when, after a triste with a former client turned into a romance, Cain’s relationship with Francesca caused him to question how he could walk in her world and survive in his own.  The boundaries of their lives then came crashing to Earth when the man whose syndicate they had destroyed returned for revenge.  The money behind the man, however, concealed a deeper, more sinister plot, one that threatened Francesca’s life and would challenge Cain to walk the razor’s edge between their two worlds while remaining true to the Ethos of Cain.

Ethos of Cain is the first novel in The Cain Series by Seth W. James.