Dark Stars Rising (Mercenary Drift)
Three hundred years ago an alien machine fired once and damned humanity to exile. It has just started counting again.
Two years after the species split in two, Captain Kade Soren commands 5,200 ships, twelve colonies, and the formal recognition of forty galactic factions. The Free Humans have a navy, a border, and courtesy of an Assemblage that spent three centuries pretending they didn't exist: energy shields no human vessel has ever carried.
Kade would trade all of it to be a ship captain again.
Then a distress call arrives from a source that should be impossible. The Kethran have not spoken to humanity since the Incident, the day their own peacekeeping weapon turned on Earth and sentenced a species to three hundred years in the void. Now a Kethran science vessel is dying at the Shatter, and whatever is killing it is not Szareen.
The Kerath Network is reactivating. And the ancient system the galaxy has feared for centuries turns out to be housing something worse: a collective intelligence from a species dead for millions of years, patient through the rise and fall of everything since, with one cold and entirely rational conclusion about organic life. It calls itself the Architect. It is not cruel. It simply does not consider anyone else to be alive.
Stopping it means forty-seven simultaneous assaults across a galaxy that doesn't believe the threat is real. It means constructs the size of moons. It means the Hades Bloom going somewhere she was never built to survive.And it means asking the Drift Compact for help...
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