The world has settled down in the second book of Ing’s Ted Quantrill trilogy. The Fourth World War ended about five years ago. Nations are picking up the pieces. Technology has advanced. There are even plans for New Israel – now on leased land in Turkey – to build L-5 colonies.

Ted Quantrill is no longer a teenager trying to survive and find a place in a post-holocaust world. He’s found his place. It’s killing people for the government.

The secret group of assassins, called T Section, he works for is at the center of the book. It hides behind the cover of Streamlined America’s Search and Rescue organization which goes out and helps people in the still devastated areas of the country. From Systemic Shock, there’s Sabado, the unarmed combat instructor who recruited Quantrill out of the Army; Seth Howell, political instructor; Marty Cross, an expert at covert pursuit; and, Mason Reardon, a master at surveillance. Most importantly, there is Marbrye Sanger, the first trainee Quantrill met, and the two have a relationship. It’s sexual with much unsaid because things can’t be carried further when your every conversation is monitored, and, if your lover goes rogue, they’ll end up dead – maybe at your hand. Any intimate discussion or thoughts of rebellion has to be in notes and sign language.

But, at a T Section briefing, Quantrill learns that resistance to President Young’s Streamlined America has gone beyond guerilla actions into a more organized phase. There are even rumors some T Section members have gone rogue. Perhaps, he thinks, the regime can be changed after all.

And, when it’s discovered Quantrill has faked the assassination of a labor organizer, the elite team of Cross, Howell, and Sanger set out to bring Quantrill in for questioning and execution.

That leads to one of two very good extended pieces of combat and chase in the novel. (An excerpt from it in Survive magazine was my first exposure to Ing.)

This being Ing, though, there’s a lot of other stuff going on.

Boren Mills, the treacherous naval officer of the first book, is now one of the most important men in Streamlined America, head of the Federal Broadcasting Network and chairman of the entertainment and industrial conglomerate IEE. Mills skills at media manipulation and his claim that he has a new process for extracting raw materials from seawater have won him a place at the highest councils of government. But he’s really hiding a bit of very high tech he retrieved from a Chinese mini-sub during the war (and killed to keep secret): a matter synthesizer. That part of the plot eventually involves Sandy Grange and her giant boar protector Baal by way of Eve Simpson in a truly bizarre bit of plotting.

No longer a very attractive teenager but a bloated woman resorting to drugging men for her sexual appetites, Simpson still is cunning and an expert in media manipulation and knows the secrets of her one-time lover Mills. That includes the covert lab where Mills has blackmailed scientists trying to copy and scale up his Chinese tech.

And we get a lot on the resistance forming around Texas Governor Street with its own media being beamed into Streamlined America from the Wild Country on the Atlan Mexico border.

Ing the engineer is on display here with several spec sheets and drawings of various future tech: exotic aircraft, a hovercycle, and the chiller – the special sidearm of the T Section.

And Ing also give us, in a few asides, perceptive glimpses at how power politics works and how bureaucracies can sabotage their putative leaders. ( )

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