The Line War may be the fifth novel in Neal Asher’s popular Agent Cormac series.

The Polity is under attack from a ‘melded’ AI entity with control of the lethal Jain technology, yet the attack appears to have no coherence. When among Erebus’s wormships kills hundreds of thousands on the world of Klurhammon, a high-tech agricultural globe of no genuine tactical significance, agent Ian Cormac is normally sent to investigate, though he’s secretly struggling to control a new capability no human being should possess . and about Line War beginning to question the motives of his AI experts.

Further attacks and apparently indiscriminate slaughter ensue, but only serve to create a few of the most dangerous people in the Polity into the war. Mr Crane, the indefatigable brass killing machine sets out for vengeance, while Orlandine, a vastly-augmented haiman who herself handles Jain technology, seeks a tool of appalling power and discovers allies from an ancient battle.

On the other hand Mika, scientist and Dragon expert, is once again kidnapped by that unfathomable alien entity and dragged in to the heart of stuff: to wake the manufacturers of Jain technology off their five-million-year slumber.

But Erebus’s attacks are not so indiscriminate, after all, and could very well herald the end of the Polity itself . . .