Unbeknownst to a population at large that drones on, one day bleeding into the next, a shadow war has irrevocably altered the world.
With the United States confronted by a catastrophic threat, the tools of the trade — politically, legally, strategically, tactically and technologically — that have been developed during the protracted Global War on Terror are now being sharpened for a newer, more decisive conflict.
Echoing the paradigm-shifting advancement made nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, a classified scientific undertaking of unprecedented scope and impact has made rapid progress while the world’s attention has been focused elsewhere.
And as with its historical predecessor, that R&D program has been supported and enabled by an equally ambitious paramilitary campaign.
Former Delta recce sniper and OGA contractor Jared Baxter is one of the few with even the slightest understanding of what is taking place and the extent of what is at stake. Once an integral part of that effort, he’s now the only one with that understanding on the outside looking in. And that has made him the prime target of the most capable, efficient, and advanced man-hunting apparatus ever conceived.
A broken man, Baxter reluctantly accepts that it is his duty to awaken the world to what’s happening around it before he’s inevitably silenced. But to do so he desperately needs help from someone.
From anyone.
From you.
Early reviews for Engines of Extinction: Episode I – The End & The Means:
Engines of Extinction is a fascinating walk-through of what an actual ‘strategic surprise’ might look like – and how America might respond. The serialized novel, a joint project with illustrator Ben Mauro, is essentially an invitation to swan dive into a yawning chasm of strategic, moral, and technological uncertainty. As you fall deeper and deeper into the darkest recesses of America’s most secret clandestine military capabilities, you are at least in interesting company with Baxter as your guide.
Given the theme of strategic surprise, it would be unfair to spoil Martin and Mauro’s work by disclosing too much about the story in this review. At a minimum, the former commando was working as a private military contractor on a sort of denied-operations counterterrorism mission treadmill before being attached to a task force tackling a mission of existential importance to the United States. There are no zombies and no vampires. Science supplants supernatural for sheer terror inside the Beltway when a truly creative writer has done his or her research, as Martin has. — August Cole, nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council and the director of the Art of Future Warfare project.
Chris Martin’s new serial is the SOF equivalent of Weir’s The Martian. Just a first rate epistolary thriller. — David Brown, co-author of The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army, and the author of Red Planet Noir, winner of the 2010 Indie Book Award for Science Fiction.
I highly recommend checking out this new military fiction series by SOFREP writer Chris Martin. This is military fiction for the War on Terror generation and there is nothing else out there like it! — Jack Murphy, former Army Ranger and Special Forces Sergeant