Ember War

She found the fleet. Now she has ninety days to use it.

When Commander Kael Maren broadcast her grandmother's final message to the free worlds, she changed everything. The Ember Council recognized her command. The hidden fleet became real. And the Sovereignty announced they were coming - in ninety days.

She has twenty-one ships. She needs one hundred.

The math is not in her favor. It never is.

Ember War picks up where Ember Rising left off, with the 90-day clock already running and no margin left for anything. Kael has to scale a solo salvage operation into a fleet command, revive thousands of crew members who have been asleep for twenty-eight years and have no idea what world they've woken into, forge an alliance with the admiral who spent the last month trying to stop her, and somehow build the doctrine and the numbers and the political cover to make the Sovereignty's arrival survivable - all before the Harmonization Fleet crosses the system boundary.

Every ship recovered costs something. Every day that passes costs something. The crew she's built - Brenn commanding his revived soldiers while still choosing the salvage freighter as home, Dax running revival protocols across a fleet with no medical infrastructure, Rinna threading impossible fold paths through dead star systems and teaching others to do what only she can do, Zhen carrying eleven thousand names and a theory that could change what winning the war even means - all of them running at maximum, all of them starting to fray at the edges.

And something else is coming. Vessel Seven's distress call reached something in the dark beyond the system boundary. Not Sovereignty. Not human. Something old, something that folds space with an efficiency no human drive has ever approached, something that has been moving toward them since before any of this began. Whether it arrives as ally, enemy, or a third category that changes the entire shape of the war is the question that runs beneath every tactical decision of the last thirty days.

The free worlds have never had one hundred warships under a single command. They have never had an anti-boarding doctrine. They have never had proof that the Sovereignty's absorbed populations can be recovered. They have none of these things at the start of this book.

By the end, the Harmonization Fleet is in the system. The fleet holds. And the war - the real war, the one that determines not just whether humanity survives but what it survives for - is just beginning.

The Ember Fleets, Book Two.