Laing's screams were lost in the firestorm pounding the section below him. When the bombardment ended, he knew Sarah was dead. No way she could have survived that. At the thought, a piece of him gave way. He gazed down into the graying dust, lost in the whirlwind. Movement. A slow crawl. Was it an illusion—his mind chewing reality into something he could digest? He looked harder, cutting through the haze. Cloaked in gore, a delicate hand stretched out. A head rose, eyes vacant and glazed. A swirling flush of color disguised the face. Then it settled into a profile he recognized. She was alive. Laing jumped to his feet, steadying himself through the wave of relief gushing through him. Despite her departure, her betrayal, their link seemed unbreakable. The knowledge gave him no joy. She had left him, damn it! And yet, he cared for her, needed her. There was love, somewhere deep in his abyss, but anger drove him forward. Anger that she had conquered him so completely, that, no matter how he tried to wall himself from the world, her life meant everything. The structure under him lurched. Ryan lashed out, catching a support girder. The grinding shear of construction grade plastic filled the night. Clinging to the girder, Laing watched the entire section under him sway, then begin to break free of the airport wall. One by one, the adhesive seals locking the barrio's supports to the port wall popped. The thirty meters of latticework Laing had just climbed down began to sway. The scaffolding pulled from the wall, caught a wind current and sheared clean. Whole sections of the Keep began to fall. Laing dodged to his right as a massive aluminum girder snapped and fell. The teetering upper zones pulled on the outer stanchions of the section below. One of the best books in spy-fiction is also one of the best books in cyberpunk. Yes, Conviser’s second novel straddles both these genres and never once slips.In Echelon, Conviser’s first novel, Ryan Laing, a nanobot-engineered secret agent, brought down the eponymous organization that controlled the world by controlling its information flow. In Empyre, he deals with the consequences of that action.
Only Laing, and Sarah Peters, his ex-lover, now infected with a biological weapon, can stop a terrorist mastermind who has set in motion a plan that, if successful, could leave the world tottering on the brink of chaos. The action starts in Lhasa, Tibet, and moves through Dubai, the CIA headquarters, a Santiago Calatrava-designed building in Manhattan, an elevated airport, the Burning Man, and a floating city before reaching a crescendo of violence in the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.
Empyre has everything that makes a spy-novel great — a likeable hero, exotic locations, double- and triple-crosses, really nasty villains. And violence. Lots and lots of violence. It also has the two main ingredients of a great cyberpunk read — a dystopian society and high-tech. But Conviser’s fascination with technology never becomes a fetish. He never sacrifices character development nor does he stop the fast and furious action to devote 10 pages to a technology. Instead, the tech is integrated into the story so seamlessly that it is hard to think of one without the other. In other words, the characters, as developed by Conviser, cannot exist outside the universe Conviser has created. They fit the world, and the world is comfortable having them there.
An interesting feature of the book is that the tech is never James Bondish. Conviser takes tech that’s in development and extrapolates them. He describes these technologies on his Website.
I have to end with a complaint though. It’s been nearly 3 years since we’ve seen Ryan Laing and Sarah Peters. And Empyre ends with enough scope for a third book. So, where’s the sequel, Mr. Conviser?
