The Long Game - Veins of Defiance - The Long Game, #1

For centuries, the Kharos, an ancient power that has never once loosened its grip, have engineered the harvest—the extraction of healthy females from the colonies for reproductive and biological purposes. The Concord of Aetherion, itself suffering from a quiet genetic decline, and bound by the Fold, its spiritual compass, carries out the attacks in exchange for continued supply of the life-extending Dials, and a share of the spoils.

Commander Kai Durant has miraculously survived thirty-four jumps through the Fold and stopped caring about anything a long time ago—not the mission, not the cost, not himself. When the fleet turns its drones on the colony system of Halcyon, ordered to slaughter the males and harvest the females, Kai finds himself protecting one of the woman the Concord sent him to harvest.

On Korath, the smaller world within the Halcyon system, no one waits to be saved. As drones fill the sky and the ancient crystal veins beneath the ridges answer with a resonance no weapon can erase, a handful of strangers—a defector commander, a scarred militia leader, a ridge daughter, and a synthetic being who was never meant to exist—are pulled into a rescue that will cost them everything they thought they understood about home, blood, and who really pulls the strings above them.

On the other colonies, Thoras and Mirael, simmering on-world tensions explode, as the Concord sides with various factions in order to complete its objectives.

Veins of Defiance is the explosive first book in The Long Game, a sprawling space opera of empire, rebellion, and the terrible cost of freedom—for readers who want morally complex, multi-POV science fiction where no one in power can be trusted, and every rescue demands a price.