Old Stars, Cold Geometry - The Slate and The Stone, #4

OLD STARS, COLD GEOMETRY*The Slate and the Stone — Morrigan's Mage, Book FourT.J. CadoganDylan Gethin is almost home. He pulls up the Sol news feeds for the first time in forty-one months, and the universe he left no longer exists.The Catholic Church has collapsed — comprehensively, and with angelic intervention noted in the financial audit. Hell is now a physical location, administered from a dome over the Stickney crater on Phobos by an entity Dylan last encountered in Rome and would rather not dwell on. Jesus has been walking along rivers, distributing a corrected edition of the Bible by high-orbit hologram, and has — as a minor side effect of adjusting Earth's orbital period for long-term climate reasons — introduced a small but navigationally significant rotation into the Moon. This is not the largest problem waiting for them.The Akinta Federation — humanity's nearest allies in the conflict with the machine civilisation that has been driving everything before it for longer than recorded history — need something only the Morrigan and her crew can provide. The machines have been building. Their production capacity is vast, their strategic patience is longer than human civilisation, and the only way to stop what's coming is to hit what they cannot afford to lose.A facility. Deep in machine-controlled space. Protected by everything they have.*Old Stars, Cold Geometry* is military science fiction that trusts its readers. The action sequences are precise and consequential. The politics are complex and treated as such. The relationships — built across four books and eighteen months of shared space — carry real weight, and when something extraordinary happens in the Morrigan's cargo bay, the ceremony is given the forty minutes it deserves.There is also a Welsh glossary, because Dylan's private journal is written in Welsh, and some of it escapes into the narrative, and the author would like you to know what he's actually saying.The Morrigan y Drydedd — the Third Morrigan, named with the Celtic goddess's own approval, carrying old magic in her hull and a stone that remembers five hundred million years of Cambrian rock — is a good ship. She has been a good ship across four volumes. She carries her crew toward what comes next at speed.The next destination is already on the screen.The ship moves on.---*For readers of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and anyone who has ever wanted military science fiction that takes mythology, language, and the interior lives of its characters as seriously as it takes orbital mechanics.**Books One through Three of The Slate and the Stone — Morrigan's Mage are available now.*