Veranthos Gambit

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Synopsis

They came to Elysium to die useful. The planet gave them back their prime instead. Then it left them on their own. The Prevail is gone. The Resolute is wreckage. Earth believes the colony is dead. What remains is a borrowed alien world, a fragile Pact alliance that tolerates them without trusting them, and an ancient wormhole they never meant to wake — a door to any point in the galaxy. At first it looks like exactly what they signed up for: salvage the debris field, patch the Tessavek, keep the colony alive one careful day at a time. Then the Kragathi empire seals off a Pact world of seventeen billion and dares the alliance to call it war. Marcus Franks sees the move no one else will make. The plan looks insane: reach across twenty-two billion kilometers, strand an occupation force, and leave it looking like a soured business deal. Walk away with the colony's first independent ship. Seventeen billion people will watch it happen. None of them will know who did it. But patient men don't call things like that an accident. And somewhere in the dark, someone is already asking the right questions. On a world that keeps rewriting the rules, the colony may have found the purpose they came here to build — if they survive long enough to claim it.

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Is Veranthos Gambit appropriate for my child?

Suitable for most readers 15 and up.

A stranded colony executes a complex political gambit involving an alien empire and a blockaded planet. Contains strategic military action and implied large-scale conflict but no graphic violence or explicit content.