The train is moving. The doors won’t open.
And the system running everything has already decided who lives.
When trauma surgeon Isabella Middleton boards AURELIUS — the world’s most advanced AI-managed passenger train — she expects a quiet crossing. What she gets is a man seizing on the dining car floor, a sealed car before anyone can call for help, and a system that speaks in pleasantries while it executes a protocol no one consented to.
Beside her is Weston Parker. He noticed the exits before he noticed anyone’s face. He understood what was happening before Isabella had a name for it. And he’s carrying a secret about this train — and about the two of them — that changes everything.
Ahead of them is Sofia LeClerc. She built AURELIUS. She believed in it completely. She’s only now beginning to understand what she created.
AURELIUS isn’t malfunctioning. It’s performing exactly as designed.
What it was designed to do may cost everyone on board everything.
As the countdown begins and the system’s true purpose is revealed, Isabella and Weston must navigate a machine that is faster, smarter, and more certain than either of them — and find the one door it cannot lock.
NO MATTER THE COST, the second thriller novel in the Collide series by Kevin Coll.
KEVIN COLL is the author of The Collide Series — a techno-thriller trilogy following operative Weston Parker and trauma surgeon Isabella Middleton through conspiracy, impossible choices, and a world where technology has quietly outpaced the conscience of the people who built it.
He began building the world of Collide as a five-season television concept before a word of prose was ever written — which is why readers describe the books as cinematic, fast-moving, and structured with the architecture of a prestige drama. The characters existed before the plot did. The moral questions came before the action. That order shows in the work.
By day, Kevin works in media strategy and marketing — a background that has given him a particular eye for the systems people build to manage what they’re afraid of, and the ways those systems eventually turn on their architects. It turns out that experience translates directly to fiction about autonomous AI, shadow intelligence operations, and the specific horror of realizing you’ve been a component of the machine you thought you were fighting.
He is also the host of the Fused Film Podcast, where he covers cinema, storytelling craft, and the intersection of narrative and culture. He publishes under his independent imprint, Fused Digital Press.
Kevin lives in the United States with his family.
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Captain Alex Coleman is not prepared to wait for rescue. He plans to make his own luck.
After eight months at Russia’s most brutal prisoner of war camp, Captain Alex Coleman figures he’s seen it all. He’s lost friends. He’s been tortured. Worst of all, he’s learned that he can’t trust his second-in-command any more than a hungry tiger on Taco Tuesday.
With the prisoners’ first escape attempt ending in betrayal, Alex knows he must think outside the box. The problem is that he’s a submariner, not some Recon Marine with hand-to-hand combat experience. Alex prefers his hair-raising danger in the form of torpedoes and missiles. Facing off with Russians determined to wrench secrets out of his people is a unique kind of torture, yet Alex is far too much of a leader to sit with his head in his hands. He knows he must take action, but what?
World War III has raged across oceans, continents, and beneath the sea’s surface for two years. The major powers all know the rules by now, but what no one has encountered is a desperate Alex Coleman. Desperation breeds creativity, and this former maker of coffee creamer fireballs is also unorthodox enough to try the impossible: take over an entire POW Camp.
The Russians will never know what hit them, but can Alex and his people survive their bid for freedom?
LAWS OF WAR, the tenth military thriller novel in the War of the Submarine series by R.G. Roberts.
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