Description
Don't step on the cracks - everyone knew the sense of that. One of the first things you learned as a child. But too many people forgot. Or didn't care. Graham Smith cared. He knew that paving stones set the cadence of a street; that cracks regulated the stride length and set the resonance that kept everything stable and harmonious. Step on the cracks and the street slipped out of kilter. Imperceptibly at first. Minute changes around the edges, a new person living at number thirty-three, a strange car outside number five. Step on the cracks too often and...well, anything could happen. He'd seen houses turned into blocks of flats overnight. Parades of shops come and go. Terraces demolished, office blocks erected. All overnight when no one was looking. The world was a far more fragile place than people realized.And every now and then a thread would work loose and something or someone would unravel.
Read More
Allen Caine was too young to remember when the Earth had not been a conquered planet, one of many such in the huge and sprawling Rygril empire, but he knew of the legendary blackcollars, guerilla warriors trained to the limit of human speed and skill, then turned into nearly superhuman combatants by use of the now-lost backlash drug. Earth and its former colony worlds had been overwhelmed, but sparks of rebellion still smoldered, and the rebel underground on Earth had sent Caine on an undercover mission to the former Earth colony of Plinry, where there was a faint hope that a blackcollar unit still existed. The underground alone knew of a secret that might be humanity's ace in the hole. And if a remnant of blackcollar fighters still existed on Plinry, they were the only hope of playing that ace in a final bid for the freedom of humanity. Publisher's Note: This book has appeared in parts as The Blackcollar and Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission. This is the first unified appearance of the complete book.
Read Less