A back-cover promise

In the year 2400, an Order construction fleet arrives at Ferros, a twin-sun world of iron shores and black seas. Its surveys have missed the civilization underneath. The Egits have spent twenty-five thousand years living by one inherited warning: Beware the interlopers. Nearly four centuries earlier, Alexander Bastion built Q to solve problems no government could coordinate. In the novel’s alternate future, civil war and global conflict culminate in the destruction of Warsaw. Q prevents the wider nuclear exchange. Earth survives. The Return Bastion expected does not come. As Earth builds Super Terra and expands through the Waypoint network, commanders encounter human worlds with unfamiliar languages, different histories and the same terrible pattern: a teacher, a warning, a catastrophe, and no promised rescue. Some retain a fraction of their people. Others have only recordings and ruins. Bastion had named the First Wall in 2031: the proposed boundary between created spacetime and its creator. Now he wants to cross it. Reset is his answer, and the Order will build it long after his body disappears. Captain Danger has another answer. An untraceable hacker with a ship the Order cannot find, he returns from cryosleep to discover that the plan has survived its founder. On Ferros, Lyra’s fight for her people becomes an alliance with a man whose brilliance cannot excuse his mistakes. To stop the whole machine at once, they must carry a new virus into a gamma station’s Q control room. Ferros offers their best chance because the Order never expected its advanced defenders. The final decision arrives at a console. The result belongs to what comes next. This is a work of speculative fiction and alternate history. Depictions of real people and events are fictionalized.