Dormant

A coalition aircraft falls out of the sky over Europe's eastern front. The official finding is two words long: cause undetermined.

David Carver knows better. For months he has been trying to live as an ordinary man – a programme director, a husband, a father with a second child on the way – and trying not to see the patterns he was trained to read. But a fault that is placed, rather than failed, leaves a signature, and once David has seen it he cannot unsee it. Somewhere out there is an enemy that does not attack so much as wait: hollowing out the systems a European coalition cannot go to war without, and leaving them to fail on a trigger written years before, by a hand no one has learned to find.

The organisation behind it is older than most of the states it preys on – patient, deniable, and, David slowly understands, already standing on the other side of a wall inside his own home. To stop the next one, he will have to reach a man no one reaches, and find in him the single human thing the whole machine was built to do without. And when he finds it, he will have to decide what he is willing to become in order to use it.

DORMANT is the second novel in the David Carver trilogy, following INSERTION.