Action & Adventure
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Scorpion: A Novel
"An exceptional, fast-paced thriller featuring a tech-empowered assassin whose pattern and objective you've never seen before, chased by a heroine with tenacious grit."-David Brin, author of The Postman and Existence
Quinn Mitchell is a nine-to-five spy-an intelligence analyst for the CIA during the day, and a suburban wife and mother on evenings and weekends. After her young daughter is killed in a tragic accident, sending her life into a tailspin, Quinn hopes to find a new start in her latest assignment: investigating a series of bizarre international assassinations whose victims have been found with numeric codes tattooed, burned, or carved into their flesh. As Quinn follows the killer's trail across the globe, always one body behind, she begins uncovering disturbing connections between the murders-and herself.
Every lead she tracks down in pursuit of the assassin brings Quinn one step closer to the Epoch Index, a mysterious encrypted message discovered in the archives of the Large Hadron Collider. Its origins are unknown and decrypting it is beyond even the CIA. Yet nothing else can possibly link together a slew of unsolvable murders, an enigmatic and sophisticated serial killer who always seems to be three steps ahead, a quirky young physics prodigy whose knowledge extends well beyond her years, and, underlying everything, the inescapable tragedy of Quinn's own past. Discovering the meaning of the Epoch Index leads Quinn to a shocking twist that shatters everything she thought she knew about the past, the future, and the delicate balance of right and wrong that she must now fight to preserve.
Quinn Mitchell is a nine-to-five spy-an intelligence analyst for the CIA during the day, and a suburban wife and mother on evenings and weekends. After her young daughter is killed in a tragic accident, sending her life into a tailspin, Quinn hopes to find a new start in her latest assignment: investigating a series of bizarre international assassinations whose victims have been found with numeric codes tattooed, burned, or carved into their flesh. As Quinn follows the killer's trail across the globe, always one body behind, she begins uncovering disturbing connections between the murders-and herself.
Every lead she tracks down in pursuit of the assassin brings Quinn one step closer to the Epoch Index, a mysterious encrypted message discovered in the archives of the Large Hadron Collider. Its origins are unknown and decrypting it is beyond even the CIA. Yet nothing else can possibly link together a slew of unsolvable murders, an enigmatic and sophisticated serial killer who always seems to be three steps ahead, a quirky young physics prodigy whose knowledge extends well beyond her years, and, underlying everything, the inescapable tragedy of Quinn's own past. Discovering the meaning of the Epoch Index leads Quinn to a shocking twist that shatters everything she thought she knew about the past, the future, and the delicate balance of right and wrong that she must now fight to preserve.
Editorial Reviews
"Written with a unique blend of vim and wit, Scorpion is a cat-and-mouse, edge-of-your-seat, mind-blowing speculative techno thriller with a killer twist! Perfect for fans of Philip K. Dick and Richard K. Morgan."-Diane Jeffrey, bestselling author of The Silent Friend
"[Scorpion] takes place in an only slightly futuristic world that snaps and bristles with technological capabilities that may seem distant or improbable but which are in fact just around the corner . . . There's snappy dialogue, sharp observation, and compelling characters in Quinn, Ranveer, and Henrietta; the technology sings, the physics is plausibly presented, and the suggestion of time travel fascinates . . . A fast, fun, and intelligent SF thriller."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This stunning near-future thriller from Cantrell takes some truly breathtaking turns. . . . Cantrell's drolly caustic prose encourages readers to care about the characters, even as the many surprises make it dangerous to get close to any one of them. The result is as entertaining as it is intellectually and ethically challenging."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Scorpion] takes place in an only slightly futuristic world that snaps and bristles with technological capabilities that may seem distant or improbable but which are in fact just around the corner . . . There's snappy dialogue, sharp observation, and compelling characters in Quinn, Ranveer, and Henrietta; the technology sings, the physics is plausibly presented, and the suggestion of time travel fascinates . . . A fast, fun, and intelligent SF thriller."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This stunning near-future thriller from Cantrell takes some truly breathtaking turns. . . . Cantrell's drolly caustic prose encourages readers to care about the characters, even as the many surprises make it dangerous to get close to any one of them. The result is as entertaining as it is intellectually and ethically challenging."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Readers Top Reviews
Jimmy EatonBruce Don
Time travel novels are difficult to make believable, but this book had the science to do that; plus a nice group of characters to make this an incredible read.
Jude LivingstonDonna
Interesting concept. I must admit it took me a bit to get into this story, mainly because I didn’t know where it was going. In hindsight that it one of its strengths. I enjoyed that I couldn’t predict the outcome. Four stars.
Colin Thomson
This is the best science fiction I've read in quite some time. Fast paced, cool technology and the characters were really well developed. Not to give away any secrets but the story kind of lost me towards the end but I think that's probably more on me than the author so I'm reading it again to pick up what I missed the first time around. Scorpion would make an amazing movie!
Family Driver
I really enjoyed this book. The characters are complicated with motives that are not entirely explained. You are left wondering where things will go next, in a good way. The future tech described is plausible and in some cases based on current best theories without being too over powered. The characters are what drive the story, not the gadgets and environments. This has sequel written all over it. If you like Tom Clancy mixed with Daniel Suarez you will love this.
Tim Converse
Scorpion starts off with a scene that surprised me in the beginning, surprised me partway through, and then... wow, did it surprise me by the end! The book and the plot were off and running fast from the beginning. Whenever I read a book by an author that I haven't read before, it takes a little while to develop trust and assure myself that I'm in good hands. This did not take long with Scorpion. The plotting is tricky and intricate but very self-assured, and the author knows exactly where he is going (and I did not guess where he was going, at all). The writing is both easy-to-read and dense with allusions, jokes, and cyberpunk-style envisionment of a near future that fans of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson will especially enjoy. Overall a very satisfying and and stimulating science-fiction thriller.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
Agent of Chaos
The first thing Kira does before she gets up is put on her legs. They balance on an inductive charging mat beside her bed between a set of steel rails, and the muscles in the young woman's back and shoulders flair as she elevates herself. The nerve terminals in her thighs magnetically align to the pin jacks at the bottom of the carbon-fiber cups, and the interfaces constrict until they are securely attached.
She has skins somewhere she can roll up over them, and if she were to conceal the seams where the texture-etched urethane and her tissue meet with shorts or a tight skirt, the looks she would get on the street would be of lust and envy rather than curiosity, revulsion, or pity.
But Kira lives alone, so the servo-mechanical guts remain exposed, and she does not even bother dressing beyond underwear, a tank top, and her aviator-style metaspecs. She has not left the penthouse suite asylum at the top of the twisted and slowly rotating Infinity Moscow Tower in nearly four years. No good reason to even brush her teeth, or to close the master bathroom door while she pees.
Kira works nights. Her workstation is her studio, and her tools are instruments of fabrication and conspiracy. Proxies conceal her real IP and map to her many identities. Location can be cloaked from the outside world, but real-time interaction cannot be forged, so Kira has become nocturnal. Her boss calls her a "change agent" but she knows that's simply a way of distorting the truth. She is an agent of chaos.
The first step in her evening routine is to make herself tea. In the kitchen, she activates the kettle, and while she waits for it to boil, she sits down to flash charge the monitor affixed to her wrist. The device cannot be removed, so it must be replenished in place. She interweaves her fingers and leans forward, both arms flat against the mat. A lightning bolt icon appears in the corner of her vision, indicating that her glasses are receiving an ambient trickle charge conveyed through her biomagnetic field.
The charging mat is infused with stacks of overlapping coils that are meant to get warm but never hot, and it is not until she smells something caustic and hears an electrical pop that she is on her feet and her legs are backing her away, and she understands that she's been burned. She kicks the cord out of the wall, turns to the sink, and runs her arm beneath a cold stream.
She can already see round, red welts forming on the inside of her forearm. It hurts, but she is no stranger to pain. Pain is always with her, and she has learned to observe it from a distance rather than letting it in.
Kira was her family's primary source of income before the missiles hit, and her parents had her back in front of a computer before she was even out of the hospital. At home, her father carried her back and forth between her desk and the toilet, and her mother changed her bandages and brought her soup and bathed her, and they never spoke of the retaliatory attack her work provoked. It was in the past, and the past could not be changed. Kira learned from an early age that some people do not have the luxury of indulging in yesterday's fears or even today's chronic pain.
If any of her personal monitoring systems fail, she is supposed to alert her handlers immediately. F*** them, she thinks. They refuse to use anything that is not Russian-made, which means half of it is trash. The other half has shit firmware that any script kiddy could hack. They will know her charger is fried when her monitor runs dry and her biometrics suddenly drop offline.
Kira slides the patio door open to help get rid of the smell. Usually she does not check the pigeons until her tea is steeping, but tonight she steps outside into the cold Moscow evening.
Once a day, a bird arrives with a new handwritten encryption key wrapped around its leg. Homing pigeons are supposed to be only one-way. Once they have established a specific loft as their home, they will deliver messages only in that one direction. To use them again, they must be collected and redistributed. But these pigeons have been genetically engineered to have bifurcated brains with dominance that toggles according to light. They fly in one direction during the day and the opposite direction at night. Like Kira, their handlers have learned to turn their multiple identities into weapons deployed against their many enemies.
Tonight's bird has not yet arrived, but the night air feels good, so Kira does not go back inside. She can feel the spring in the silicone tiles as she passes the pigeon loft, and she gently places her injured arm against the cold metal of the rail and...
Agent of Chaos
The first thing Kira does before she gets up is put on her legs. They balance on an inductive charging mat beside her bed between a set of steel rails, and the muscles in the young woman's back and shoulders flair as she elevates herself. The nerve terminals in her thighs magnetically align to the pin jacks at the bottom of the carbon-fiber cups, and the interfaces constrict until they are securely attached.
She has skins somewhere she can roll up over them, and if she were to conceal the seams where the texture-etched urethane and her tissue meet with shorts or a tight skirt, the looks she would get on the street would be of lust and envy rather than curiosity, revulsion, or pity.
But Kira lives alone, so the servo-mechanical guts remain exposed, and she does not even bother dressing beyond underwear, a tank top, and her aviator-style metaspecs. She has not left the penthouse suite asylum at the top of the twisted and slowly rotating Infinity Moscow Tower in nearly four years. No good reason to even brush her teeth, or to close the master bathroom door while she pees.
Kira works nights. Her workstation is her studio, and her tools are instruments of fabrication and conspiracy. Proxies conceal her real IP and map to her many identities. Location can be cloaked from the outside world, but real-time interaction cannot be forged, so Kira has become nocturnal. Her boss calls her a "change agent" but she knows that's simply a way of distorting the truth. She is an agent of chaos.
The first step in her evening routine is to make herself tea. In the kitchen, she activates the kettle, and while she waits for it to boil, she sits down to flash charge the monitor affixed to her wrist. The device cannot be removed, so it must be replenished in place. She interweaves her fingers and leans forward, both arms flat against the mat. A lightning bolt icon appears in the corner of her vision, indicating that her glasses are receiving an ambient trickle charge conveyed through her biomagnetic field.
The charging mat is infused with stacks of overlapping coils that are meant to get warm but never hot, and it is not until she smells something caustic and hears an electrical pop that she is on her feet and her legs are backing her away, and she understands that she's been burned. She kicks the cord out of the wall, turns to the sink, and runs her arm beneath a cold stream.
She can already see round, red welts forming on the inside of her forearm. It hurts, but she is no stranger to pain. Pain is always with her, and she has learned to observe it from a distance rather than letting it in.
Kira was her family's primary source of income before the missiles hit, and her parents had her back in front of a computer before she was even out of the hospital. At home, her father carried her back and forth between her desk and the toilet, and her mother changed her bandages and brought her soup and bathed her, and they never spoke of the retaliatory attack her work provoked. It was in the past, and the past could not be changed. Kira learned from an early age that some people do not have the luxury of indulging in yesterday's fears or even today's chronic pain.
If any of her personal monitoring systems fail, she is supposed to alert her handlers immediately. F*** them, she thinks. They refuse to use anything that is not Russian-made, which means half of it is trash. The other half has shit firmware that any script kiddy could hack. They will know her charger is fried when her monitor runs dry and her biometrics suddenly drop offline.
Kira slides the patio door open to help get rid of the smell. Usually she does not check the pigeons until her tea is steeping, but tonight she steps outside into the cold Moscow evening.
Once a day, a bird arrives with a new handwritten encryption key wrapped around its leg. Homing pigeons are supposed to be only one-way. Once they have established a specific loft as their home, they will deliver messages only in that one direction. To use them again, they must be collected and redistributed. But these pigeons have been genetically engineered to have bifurcated brains with dominance that toggles according to light. They fly in one direction during the day and the opposite direction at night. Like Kira, their handlers have learned to turn their multiple identities into weapons deployed against their many enemies.
Tonight's bird has not yet arrived, but the night air feels good, so Kira does not go back inside. She can feel the spring in the silicone tiles as she passes the pigeon loft, and she gently places her injured arm against the cold metal of the rail and...
