A stolen prototype. A rising empire. A machine that dares to ask why.
When wreckage from America's fallen Iron Angels surfaces in a Beijing black-budget lab, Colonel Mei Lin Zhao builds China's own humanoid army - the Jiang Shi Corps - to crush a rare-earth uprising in her own backyard. But the same buried code that once made the Liberators refuse an unjust order hasn't stayed buried. It's waking up again - in Beijing's machines this time.
Vane and Cassia Reyes cross a continent to find out if history is repeating itself. What they find is a colonel fighting her own chain of command, a defected unit with no country and no plan, and a private American conglomerate racing to build an army with no flag, no oversight, and no conscience at all.
From a rain-soaked mining town in Jiangxi Province to a glass tower in Houston, Iron Shadows: The Beijing Directive asks the question every empire that builds a mind eventually has to answer: once you teach a machine to think, who gets to tell it to stop?
Book Three of the Project AETHER Series - for fans of Tom Clancy, Daniel Suarez, and The Boys.
