The Green Panthers

by Tom Vater

An underground environmental army uncovers a millionaires’ escape plan—and a far greater threat to the planet they intend to leave.

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THE STORY

About the book

Themes

Environmental Responsibility

Tropes

Race Against the Clock

Meet Clara Green, Emerald, Chartreuse, Olive, Hunter, Juniper and Forest. They are The Green Panthers: a privately sponsored, multi-national underground army, on a mission to hold corporate polluters to account.

During the attempted rescue of a snow leopard hunted by British tycoons in Siberia, the Green Panthers stumble onto Project SILEO, a millionaires’ plot to abandon an overpopulated, dying planet battered by climate change and pollution.

But SILEO is a lot more than it seems and the Panthers soon learn of an even greater threat to humanity. From Britain to Thailand and the privately-owned space station Stella Blue, the Panthers race against time to save the human race from a man known only as the Slow King. As riots and unrest take hold all over the world, can they stop the Slow King's apocalyptic ambitions?

An action-packed dystopian thriller, The Green Panthers explores systemic corruption, capitalism, space exploration and climate change, as well as the nature of friendship and courage in a future world where everything is for sale.

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Read an excerpt

She needed to kill.

And soon.

The pink snow leopard was hungry. She’d been moving along the high valleys and the wide, ragged ridges of the Altai Mountains, unaware that she was passing between Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan on her search for sustenance. Nor did she know that she was traversing the Saylyugem National Park, established to protect her and her kind. Even as she had no fixed route in mind, her mission was clear.

This morning, as the pale, grey sun crept over ridges that revealed themselves one after another with majestic coyness, she sensed something in the rarified air. It drifted in from far away, from a spot deeper in the national park and lower down too. Not an area she’d ever choose to pass through. Too warm. Too much exposure. She didn’t know this, but the principal reason why some four thousand snow leopards remained alive in Asia was their extraordinary caution. Distant sisters of the tiger, the big cats were considered part of the Panthera genus. Theirs was a solitary, remote existence. Snow leopards spent their lives keeping a low profile, rarely meeting one another, and staying as far away from humans as circumstances allowed.

But now she carried a secret. Soon she would no longer be solitary. Soon, Russia’s snow leopard population was going to expand significantly. She stuck her head into the warm wind that swept up the valley from where she’d sensed the promising scent. Too warm. Too much exposure at this time of year. But the last meal she’d had, a week earlier, a young, scrawny, injured ibex she’d chased into a ravine, was barely a memory. She sat for an hour or two, watching, listening, and sniffing for movement below. Vaguely satisfied that her senses failed to detect a threat lurking down-valley, she dropped off the ridge, through rocky boulders and fields of scree, in silence, barely visible. Had anyone been watching, she might have appeared momentarily as nothing more than a brilliant flash of the imagination. Instead, she was feeding a series of state-of-the-art camera traps that relayed her every move to the park’s headquarters and from there to two sets of plush offices in the City of London.

The world’s last pink Panthera uncia was about to become a celebrity. Of the very wrong kind.