A survey ship, the Endurance, months out into an uncharted region, loses her captain and every link home in the same hour. Command falls by the rulebook to a Geneva diplomat who's never run a ship, and the one officer who could actually hold the deck is the one nobody picked. Then they have to find their own way back the old way: dead reckoning, trusting nothing but their own logged track.
This is a first-command thriller and it's completely standalone. You can start the universe here.
- Amazon (Kindle, free on Kindle Unlimited)
- Read the opening and see every other store: https://fracturedcosmology.xyz/books/dead-reckoning/
- Free audiobook on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NoUtuX-yX8
- Also on Spotify as a podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/033KCNqkFvlChPvWNOClXS
- The diplomat-in-the-chair problem. Did you side with the rulebook or the deck?
- "Every choice costs something that doesn't come back." Which one hurt most?
- Did the navigation stuff read as real to you, or did it get in the way?
Spoilers for this book are fine below. It's the book's own thread. Anything from a later book or another series, wrap it in [spoiler] tags so nobody gets ambushed.