Ember Rising

Twenty-eight years ago, Admiral Sera Maren didn't destroy humanity's last fleet at the Battle of Kepler's Reach. She hid it. Two hundred warships. Two hundred dead-star systems. Two hundred skeleton crews in stasis, waiting for someone with the right bloodline to find them - someone Sera couldn't warn, couldn't prepare, couldn't even tell. Because telling them would have meant trusting everything to a person who might not survive long enough to use it. That person is her granddaughter. And she has no idea. Commander Kael Maren is thirty-one, disgraced, and running a salvage freighter on the edge of known space. When a dead man leaves her a message and a communicator hidden in a derelict's sealed panel activates at her touch, it sets her on a fourteen-hour fold to a dead-star system that should be empty. It isn't. Now Kael has hundreds of people in stasis across ships the free worlds believe were destroyed. She has a crew of four who voted to follow her into the most dangerous recovery operation in human history. She has an admiral who wants the fleet for herself, a Sovereignty advance vessel that's been watching from the outer system boundary for over a year, and her grandmother's voice - recorded before Kepler's Reach, waiting twenty-eight years to be heard - telling her things she needed to hear half a lifetime ago. And she has ninety days. The Sovereignty doesn't conquer worlds. It absorbs them - erasing culture, memory, and identity until nothing of the original civilization remains. The Harmonization Fleet is already moving. The free worlds don't know. And the only thing standing between humanity and absorption is two hundred ships hidden across the dead-star catalog, a salvage captain who keeps going back in alone, and the crew that's slowly, stubbornly becoming the only family she has left. EMBER RISING is the first book in The Ember Fleets trilogy - a space opera about an impossible inheritance, the cost of going it alone, and what you owe the world when the world has already taken everything from you. For readers of The Expanse, Old Man's War, and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.