Fifth volume in the Horseclans sf series. First published by NAL as a paperback original in 1980.

''US soldier and author best known for his Post-Holocaust Horseclans sequence of adventures set after 2500 CE in a series of states occupying what was once the USA and dominated from behind the scenes by a strain of immortal mutants, while an unsavoury group of human scientists opposes them from a secret base. Occasionally the reader gains sight of repulsive sects who decayedly parody twentieth-century movements - Ecology, for instance - that were btes-noires of the author, who was not averse to polemical intrusions which have not perhaps worn very well, though he did not utter the full-blown Survivalist doctrines adopted by writers who followed him'' (John Clute/Encyclopedia of SF, 3rd Edition).