Dogs of War

My name is Rex. I am a good dog.... Rex is also seven feet tall at the shoulder, bulletproof, bristling with heavy-calibre weaponry, and a deadly weapon in a dirty war. He's part of a Multiform Assault Pack operating in the lawless anarchy of Campeche, southeastern Mexico. He has the intelligence to carry out his orders and feedback implants to reward him when he does. All he wants to be is a Good Dog, and to do that he must do exactly what Master says.

My name is Rex. I am a good dog. Rex is also seven foot tall at the shoulder, bulletproof, bristling with heavy calibre weaponry and his voice resonates with subsonics especially designed to instil fear. With Dragon, Honey and Bees, he's part of a Multiform Assault Pack operating in the lawless anarchy of Campeche, Mexico. A genetically engineered Bioform, he's a deadly weapon in a dirty war. All he wants to be is a Good Dog. And to do that he must do exactly what Master says and Master says he's got to kill a lot of enemies.

Mars. The red planet. A new frontier for humanity: a civilisation where humans can live in peace, lord and master of all they survey. But this isn't Space City from those old science-fiction books. It's more like Hell City, built into and from a huge crater. There's a big silk canopy over it, feeding out atmosphere as we generate it, little by little, because we can't breathe the air here. I guess it's a perfect place to live, if you want to live on Mars. At some point I must have wanted to live on Mars, because here I am.

Jimmy Martin has a sore head. He's used to smuggling illegal data in his headspace. But this is the first time it has started talking to him. The data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist. It also claims to be a bear. A bear named Honey. Jimmy has nothing against bioforms–he's one himself, albeit one engineered out of human stock–and works with them everyday in Hell City, building the future, staking mankind's claim to a new world: Mars.

The end of the world has been and gone. There was no one great natural disaster, no all-consuming world war, no catastrophic pandemic. Only scores of storms, droughts, and selfish regional conflicts. Humanity was not granted a heroic end. Instead, it bled to death from a thousand cuts. But where Earth fell apart, Mars pulled together. Engineered men and beasts, aided by Bees – an outlawed distributed intelligence – survived through co-operation, because there was simply no alternative.