The Combat-K Series are a quartet of military scifi novels, War Machine, Biohell, Hardcore and Cloneworld by Andy Remic, starring the titular Combat-K squad, Keenan, Pippa and Franco.
The Combat-K Series provides examples of:
- Abandoned Hospital: Krakken IV, aka, Sick World has this as its hat. It was originally colonized to become the dedicated hospital world of a multi-galactic civilization, but due to multiple mutagenic contagions spreading between imported patients and the influence of VOLOS, a planetwide Genius Loci undiscovered by the original colonists until showed itself by turning the entire planet and its population into a Medical Horror themed Death World which it ruled over the mutated survivors of as a malevolent living deity.
- Artificial Intelligence: Cam, Sax, and Battle SIMs.
- Artificial Zombie: The victims of Nano-Tek's BioMods. They're heavily mutated, intelligent enough to use weapons and under the control of Nano-Tek Corporation's Greensource Mainframe. Having them go on a brain-eating rampage was beta-testing to weed out the weak and determine which variety of mutation would make the best soldiers.
- Body Horror: Everywhere. The zombie plague in Biohell, Melanie following exposure to an extremely flawed nanotechnological supersoldier serum, the entire planetary population of Krakken IV, aka, Sick World, etc.
- Catchphrase: "They don't call me Franco 'descriptive term' Haggis for nothing."
- Determinator: Batezh, Franco's doctor at the Mount Pleasant Hilltop Institution will not tolerate escapees, even if it means having to singlehandedly hunt a trained team of elite soldiers across multiple planets. Becomes much more understandable when it turned out he wasn't actually a doctor but a spy assigned to keep an eye on Franco even in the depths of an insane asylum.
- Eldritch Abomination: Leviathan and to a lesser extent, VOLOS.
- Expy: The Junks are basically a scifi version of J. R. R. Tolkien's orcs, having originally been a civilized and sophisticated species called the Junkala captured by a malevolent superbeing and tortuously mutilated into an army of hateful killing machines with hats of environmental destruction and industrialization.
- Lodged-Blade Recycling: Doctor Oz, CEO of Nano-Tek after being stabbed by Pippa, since he's used his own product to become a become a human-shaped glob of nanites with hypereffective regeneration.
- Recruiting the Criminal: Combat-K's standard recruitment method. Keenan was a police detective who killed a pedophile he'd caught whose wealth and political connections had gotten him an insufficient sentence, Pippa stabbed her alcoholic father to death with scissors after he killed her mother and after Franco's mother died and the mining megacorporation employing him as an explosives expert refused to give him time off, he blew up their entire mine.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Franco likes really terrible synthetic sausages. Also horseradish.
