Disruption

Most of the combatants in the next war won't be human. Some of them are rats.

Fired, broke and out of options, Keith Wilson joins the army—and learns what fifth-generation warfare means when a firmware attack seizes his squad's own battlesuits and drops his evacuation flight out of the sky. Half a world away, Stella runs a marine salvage company from a floating farm until pirates take her in the night, and the authorities decline to trouble themselves with her fate.

So the rescue falls to people nobody counts: two refugee brothers on an Anatolian farm who have spent years wiring rats, crows and locusts into a surveillance network nobody thought to ban. It can track a pirate crew across an ocean from the DNA in a rat's stomach.

Around them, the world is choosing sides. A hacker collective that calls itself insurance against the temptations of power. An oligarch who has concluded that whoever owns the AIs owns the people. And a king on a plastic-eating island who used to free dolphins for a living.

The second book of Singularity's Children: the empire doesn't understand what's replacing it. Destroying it requires no understanding.