The Night of the Trolls

Eighty years vanish in a blink. Jackson wakes from suspended animation to find the world he knew has burned to ash. The military research facility where he volunteered as a test subject now stands silent, its corridors dark, its secrets buried under decades of decay. Outside, a fractured society claws through the ruins, ruled by warlords and haunted by remnants of the technology that once defined humanity. Among those remnants is something far more dangerous than a dead world: a Bolo, a self-aware super-tank that may be the only force standing between Jackson and the iron-fisted Baron who now commands the shadows. This is survival at its most primal, a one-man war against both man and machine in a landscape where the future died before he ever woke. Laumer builds tension like a slow fuse, and the Bolo emerges not just as a weapon but as something closer to soulmate, a relationship that would become one of science fiction's most enduring partnerships.