The battle commenced with the destruction of the one known gateway into the Mosaic, and Mesme sneaked onto the lead Machim warship and stole the Tartarus Trigger. Humanity used its Prevos, Rifts and other tricks to take the Anadens by surprise and prevail in the battle. Afterward, Alex, Caleb, Miriam and Mesme were summoned to a secret meeting with the leader of the anarchs, Danilo Nisi, and a tenuous alliance was formed.
AEGIS scored several early victories but also devastating losses. While the battles raged, Alex and the other Prevos developed a method for using sidespace to open physical wormholes, enabling AEGIS vessels to travel anywhere in known space without using the Anaden gateway system.
The AEGIS fleet attacked the Machim homeworld, destroying the Dyson rings encircling its sun and blowing up their orbital military command station. At the same time, Nisi broadcast an impassioned speech across the empire setting forth the Directorate’s sins and the anarch’s mission to free those oppressed.
In a flashback Caleb’s diati showed him, it was revealed that Nisi was actually Corradeo Praesidis, the former leader of the powerful Anaden Praesidis dynasty. Many millennia ago, his son tried to kill him; thinking him dead, the son stole his name, face and power, and now served on the Directorate as the Praesidis Primor.
Valkyrie and her twin, Vii, had spent months rebuilding the consciousness of David Solovy that manifested during the final battle of the Metigen War. Using the Anadens’ regenesis technology, they transferred his consciousness to a cloned body, and he and Miriam were reunited after twenty-five years.
The Directorate tracked an AEGIS vessel to the primary anarch base and launched a surprise attack, and a bloody battle followed in orbit and on the ground. To stop a Machim warship from bombing the base with antimatter missiles, Alex re-established her ethereal connection with the Siyane to bypass the warship’s shielding and destroy it; in doing so, she found the connection no longer exerted the damaging hold on her it once did.
Alex soon discovered a way to use the supradimensional properties of the mysterious Reor mineral to access the contents of the Reor slabs used by the Directorate to store sensitive information. She uncovered the location of the Directorate’s regenesis backups, and AEGIS and the anarchs devised a plan to take out the entire Directorate, permanently, in one massive strike.
For all but two of the Directorate members, the mission succeeded with minimal losses. However, the Machim Primor escaped his assassination attempt. Armed with the location of one of the Mosaic gateways, he acquired a new Tartarus Trigger and raced to wipe out the Aurora universe.
On Solum (Earth’s twin), Caleb engaged the Praesidis Primor in a battle of staggeringly powerful diati, and the diati freed when the Primor died rampaged wild. Caleb couldn’t wrestle it under control, and it killed millions before destroying the planet itself.
The anarchs learned that the Primors kept an additional regenesis backup stored on their secret space station, the Protos Agora, which orbited the Milky Way galactic core. The Stalwart II took the Tartarus Trigger Mesme stole at the start of the conflict and used it to destroy the station.
Just when they believed they had finally achieved victory, they discovered the Machim Primor’s plans. The Primor had a head start, and the only way to try to prevent him from destroying Aurora was for the Kats to disconnect it from the Mosaic, rendering it unreachable forever. Caleb, however, instead used his now total control over diati to command the cosmic force to pull all the pocket universes in the Mosaic—including Aurora—into Amaranthe, then destroy the Mosaic.
He succeeded, but the energy the act required killed him. While Miriam and the others worked out what it meant for all of humanity to now exist in Amaranthe, Alex took Caleb to the living planet of Akeso and, via the deep connection they shared, Akeso brought him back to life.
* * *
ASTERION NOIR
On the planet of Mirai in the Gennisi galaxy, a woman woke up in a rain-soaked alley with no memory of who she was or how she’d gotten there. Two strangers found her and offered to take her in. When asked, she told them her name was Nika, though she didn’t know why.
Fast forward to five years later. Nika, alongside her rescuers Perrin and Joaquim, led a group of rebels called NOIR against the despotic government of the Asterion Dominion. An insidious virutox was infecting people’s programming, altering their personalities and causing them to commit inexplicable crimes. NOIR’s investigation of the virutox brought them to Dashiel Ridani, who Nika learned was her lover in her prior life, before she lost her memory.
With her world thrown into disarray, Nika and Dashiel chased the threads of her lost identity while searching for the source of the virutox. Their search led them to the leaders of the Asterion Dominion, the Guides. Nika broke into the Guides’ data vault, where she found they had ordered her psyche-wipe five years earlier after she pressed them on a series of disappearances.
Meanwhile, Gemina Kail, an Administration Advisor, traveled to an alien stronghold across the galaxy, where she delivered thousands of Asterions in stasis chambers to an alien species called the Rasu.
As the virutox spread, wreaking increasing havoc across the Dominion, Justice Advisor Adlai Weiss traced the source to the Guides’ doorstep. They ordered him to drop the case and let the virutox propagate among the population. He disobeyed, developed a vaccine and contacted NOIR for help in distributing it.
Across the galaxy, Nika and Dashiel discovered the stronghold of the alien Rasu. A metal-based shapeshifting species of immense power, they’d constructed hundreds of thousands of warships and space stations. Armed with this terrifying information, Nika and Dashiel returned to Mirai.
One of the Guides, Delacrai, defied the others to help Nika. She shared how an Asterion scout ship encountered the Rasu eight years ago; the crew was captured and killed. The Rasu grew interested in the Asterions’ unique bio-synthetic intelligence powered by kyoseil and quantum programming, and in return for not attacking Asterion Dominion worlds, they demanded a regular supply of Asterions to experiment on. The Guides agreed.
The other Advisors were told the terrible truth about the Rasu and the Guides’ deal with the aliens. They scrambled to undo the damage eight years of the Rasu Protocol had inflicted while racing to find a way to respond to an impending Rasu deadline, when the aliens expected more Asterions to be delivered.
Nika’s oldest friend from her former life, Maris Debray, revealed that both she and Nika were members of the “First Generation”: Asterions who had never erased their psyches in the 700,000 years since they fled the Anaden Empire and created themselves as a new species by merging Anaden DNA, AI programming and the kyoseil mineral. Only a few dozen of the First Generation remained, and their history was kept secret from everyone else.
With time running out, Nika sought the help of the Sogain, an enigmatic species who once threatened the Asterions with extinction if they ever trespassed on Sogain territory. This time, the aliens disclosed the location of a single, stranded Rasu.
An Asterion team captured the Rasu and brought it to Mirai for interrogation. The creature revealed that the Rasu exhibited a collective intelligence when physically connected to other Rasu, but regained independent thought when they were separated. They intended to use kyoseil to control other Rasu over great distances, as kyoseil was supradimensional, deeply interconnected and one of the universe’s oldest life forms.
Using this knowledge, the Asterions identified a way to link their consciousnesses together via kyoseil. They dubbed these connections ‘ceraffin’ and used them to develop a plan to face the Rasu.
They constructed volatile electricity bombs to be sneaked into the Rasu stronghold. The Rasu were expecting 8,000 Asterions in stasis chambers, so Nika used the ceraff structure to split her psyche into shards inhabiting 8,000 copies of herself.
The copies were delivered to the Rasu as expected, and they awoke inside the Rasu’s lab on their primary space station. Chaos ensued as they fought to reach the power control c
enter, even as they were cut down by the thousands. A mere dozen made it to the control center, and a single instance survived to override the power safeguards.
Dashiel detonated the electricity bombs, and a cascading power overload ripped through the stronghold. It destroyed the Rasu’s Dyson lattice, which triggered an intense surge in solar flare activity, and all the Rasu stations and vessels were incinerated, save one vessel that escaped through a wormhole.
The Asterions recognized this was not the end of the conflict, but the beginning, and they needed to prepare for the Rasu’s return. Nika was contacted by the Sogain, who informed her the Anaden Empire of old had fallen and suggested she might find allies among the new one which had risen to take its place.
Nika journeyed to the Asterions’ ancestral home, the Milky Way. Before she arrived, however, a wormhole opened in the cabin of her ship, and Alex Solovy walked through it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my beta readers, editors and artists, who made everything about this book better, and to my family, who continue to put up with an egregious level of obsessive focus on my part for months at a time.
I also want to add a personal note of thanks to everyone who has read my books, left a review at a retailer, Goodreads or other sites, sent me a personal email expressing how the books have impacted you, or posted on social media to share how much you enjoyed them. You make this all worthwhile, every day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G. S. JENNSEN lives in Colorado with her husband and two dogs. She has become an internationally bestselling author since her first novel, Starshine, was published in 2014. She has chosen to continue writing under an independent publishing model to ensure the integrity of her stories and her ability to execute on the vision she has for their telling.
While she has been a lawyer, a software engineer and an editor, she’s found the life of a full-time author preferable by several orders of magnitude. When she isn’t writing, she’s gaming or working out or getting lost in the Colorado mountains that loom large outside the windows in her home. Or she’s dealing with a flooded basement, or standing in a line at Walmart reading the tabloid headlines and wondering who all of those people are. Or sitting on her back porch with a glass of wine, looking up at the stars, trying to figure out what could be up there.
Table of Contents
Start
Amaranthe Universe
Dramatis Personae
Maps
The Story So Far
Contents
PART I: ECHOES 1: Akeso
2: Akeso
3: Seneca
4: Kiyora
5: Mirai
6: Mirai
7: Earth
8: Pandora
9: Akeso
10: Mirai
11: Mirai
PART II: UNTETHERED 12: Hirlas
13: Epithero
14: Machimis
15: Ficenti
16: Concord HQ
17: Pandora
18: Akeso
19: Concord HQ
20: Concord HQ
21: Pandora
22: Akeso
23: Mirai
24: Mirai
25: Mirai
26: Savrak
27: Epithero
28: Domor
29: Pandora
30: Chalmun Station Asteroid
PART III: WHAT WAS LOST… 31: Siyane
32: Pandora
33: Concord HQ
34: Romane
35: Mirai
36: Concord HQ
37: Ourankeli Stellar System
38: Haelwyeur
39: Ares
40: Ares
41: Toki'taku
42: Kiyora
43: Mirai
44: Mirai
45: Savrak
46: Sogain Stellar System
47: Concord HQ
48: Siyane
PART IV: …NOW IS FOUND 49: Mirai
50: Perplanos
51: CAF Aurora
52: Ficenti
53: Haafan
54: Earth
55: Concord HQ
56: ADV Dauntless
57: Concord HQ
58: Haafan
59: CAF Aurora
60: Palaemon
61: Ares
62: Concord HQ
63: Seneca
64: Toki'taku
65: Romane
66: The Presidio
67: Savrak
68: Concord HQ
Author's Note
Appendix: Series Summary
About the Author
Table of Contents
Start
Amaranthe Universe
Dramatis Personae
Maps
The Story So Far
Contents
PART I: ECHOES 1: Akeso
2: Akeso
3: Seneca
4: Kiyora
5: Mirai
6: Mirai
7: Earth
8: Pandora
9: Akeso
10: Mirai
11: Mirai
PART II: UNTETHERED 12: Hirlas
13: Epithero
14: Machimis
15: Ficenti
16: Concord HQ
17: Pandora
18: Akeso
19: Concord HQ
20: Concord HQ
21: Pandora
22: Akeso
23: Mirai
24: Mirai
25: Mirai
26: Savrak
27: Epithero
28: Domor
29: Pandora
30: Chalmun Station Asteroid
PART III: WHAT WAS LOST… 31: Siyane
32: Pandora
33: Concord HQ
34: Romane
35: Mirai
36: Concord HQ
37: Ourankeli Stellar System
38: Haelwyeur
39: Ares
40: Ares
41: Toki'taku
42: Kiyora
43: Mirai
44: Mirai
45: Savrak
46: Sogain Stellar System
47: Concord HQ
48: Siyane
PART IV: …NOW IS FOUND 49: Mirai
50: Perplanos
51: CAF Aurora
52: Ficenti
53: Haafan
54: Earth
55: Concord HQ
56: ADV Dauntless
57: Concord HQ
58: Haafan
59: CAF Aurora
60: Palaemon
61: Ares
62: Concord HQ
63: Seneca
64: Toki'taku
65: Romane
66: The Presidio
67: Savrak
68: Concord HQ
Author's Note
Appendix: Series Summary
About the Author
Echo Rift Page 43
