The golden age of expansion is real. The wonder is real. And it is the crime.
Humanity is throwing itself across the frontier — mass-driver cargo flung between worlds and caught out of the dark, new junctions lit, colonies fed, a cold war simmering between Geneva, the colonies, the great freight combines, and the insurgents who keep saying the whole enterprise is killing the universe. Captain Daniel Cross of the ISV Lodestar believes in the dream he was built to defend. Over five books, the frontier keeps quietly proving him wrong.
Strange-new-worlds adventure that escalates to war. Action-paced, standalone-first, with the deepest cosmological reckoning the universe has yet reached underneath. Concurrent with Spent Light; the line that runs all the way to the first signal.
5 Books
Planned series
2240–2246
Timeline
ISV Lodestar
Vessel
D. Cross
Captain
Book One: The Wrong Number (2240)
An armed explorer follows an empty tug into a frontier cargo corridor and finds living people hidden inside a stolen freight stream. A rescue under fire — racing an inbound cargo train and the salvagers hunting it before a clean institutional answer becomes a colony-killing collision. And after every human fault is fixed, the junction is still drifting.
Book Two: The Guttering Light (2241)
A frontier station is sabotaged with casualties and the blame lands instantly on the insurgents. The Lodestar is sent to enforce a crackdown its captain half-believes in — and Cross discovers the terror attack is a true thing wrapped in a manufactured one, and that defending the institutions he loves now means arguing against the truth. The cold war goes overt.
Book Three: The Burning Lanes (2242–45)
A joint goodwill expedition opens a great frontier road in peace — and proves, generously and in public, exactly how much it is worth taking by force. Five stops, each a wonder; each becomes a front. The cold war draws its first blood.
Book Four: The War at the Door (2245) · working title
The lanes the expedition opened are fronts now. A ship five years lost falls home through a quiet junction carrying proof that the cold war was the small one — and that the real threat is months away, on the far side of a door nobody knew they were standing on.
Book Five: The Dimming (2245)
Humanity finally became worth saving; the universe does not care. Every people that ever crossed a Seam stands on one line — and winning the war turns out to be the same act as losing the cosmology.
Each book is a complete adventure; together they tell one continuous story — the golden age, and the cost of it. Covers and release dates are on the way.