A Grey Moon Over China — Peter David

"A Grey Moon Over China" is the story of a disillusioned company of Army engineers languishing in the Pacific during the energy wars between the United States on one side, and Japan and California on the other. They steal the plans for an energy device that could end the wars and the world's slide into environmental disaster. Instead, they extort from the world the price of their own freedom from it all: the resurrection of an abandoned space colonization effort that will take them far from the dying planet. They flee blindly and with terrible losses, for the drones sent to scout the way have never returned, and they can delay no longer. Armed colonists follow, and with them, the wars. "A Grey Moon Over China" features characters that engage our sympathy and challenge our understanding of human drives and motivation. There is Eduardo Torres, once an orphaned beggar, now a man driven to destroy everything in his path in his desire to escape his past; Sergeant Polaski, a warrior without a soul; Tuyet Pham, a young woman who arrives from nowhere but seems to know Torres better than he knows himself, and is herself a merciless but charismatic warrior; Anne Miller, the secretive high priestess of manufactured intelligence who programmed the missing drones; and Madhu Patel, their beloved father figure and philosopher who makes the mistake of trying to stand in their way.