Defiance Pattern — Sarah Stone

High-tech mercenaries find themselves pitted against freerunning revolutionaries as global corporate warfare becomes centered around a struggling island nation and the freedom fighters defending their home. Hayden Cole is a slinger for the mega-corporation Union Americana, one of the hacker elite who wage info wars in the immersive virtual realm of MassNet. He has been assigned to a task force bound for the Philippines, where he is joined by an assortment of engineers, security operatives, and Laine 2.0, the Union's most deadly cyborg assassin. A new energy source has been discovered hidden within the chain of islands, an enigmatic pulse coming from the islands themselves, forming a complex energy pattern that, if harnessed by the proper technology, could yield a world changing new source of clean energy that would replace all fossil fuel, bio fuel, and even atomic energy. Each of the primary corporate powers have sent task forces to the island, and economic competition turns violent as the opposing operatives race to find the source. Standing against all of them is a group of local resistance fighters with strange abilities and who may yet prove to be not quite human. As slingers jack into MassNet to battle with kill programs, soldiers and cyborgs clash in the streets with blades and bullets, all to the backdrop of a world left behind by the progress of a neon future in this action-packed cyberpunk thriller