The Whisper Line is eight Fracture-era engagements, one sitting each, told by eight different people holding eight different tools. A sensor tech, a gunnery officer, a quartermaster, a mining boss. No FTL, no wonder weapons, no lucky wins: the war is sublight, the couriers are slow, and everything anyone knows is already late. Each entry stands alone, each one lands, and each one turns at the last. Companion pieces to The Reserve, from other hulls. It begins with Two Minutes of Arc.
The Books
Book 1
Two Minutes of Arc
Sensor technician Rennie Calder wants one thing: to be believed. Nineteen hours from the convoy's burn window, a contact comes up in her arc, running dark at extreme range, and she works it better than she has ever worked anything. A complete sublight fleet action in one sitting, turning at the last. About 13,000 words. The Whisper Line, Book 1 of 8.
Coming soon
Book 2
Reciprocal
Nineteen hours old, and the freshest intelligence Commander Tobias Reyne has held in a year: a Rim ore convoy, six loaded hulls, an escort of two. He works the intercept properly and takes it in under forty minutes. It is the cleanest action of his career. It is also the one that will not sit right afterwards.
Coming soon
Book 3
Line of Sight
Three times Lieutenant Kroll has judged a hull's medical markings false and fired, and three times she was right. Now a fourth marked ship crosses her lane, slow and exactly to convention, with a twenty-six-minute envelope and her own hand on the key. A complete fleet action in one sitting, turning at the last.
Coming soon
Book 4
The Anchorage
Sallow Reach has no beacon, no registry entry, and no name on any chart, and for two years that silence has kept eleven mining hands alive. Then a raider comes in on one burn and stops nine kilometres off the working face, with no search pattern at all. Ferris Vane has twenty minutes, no weapons, and nobody to call.
Coming soon
Book 5
Housekeeping
Nine days under bombardment, Ninepin Station is living on stored oxygen. Emlen Skene keeps the air arithmetic, and on the ninth morning it comes out seventeen hours short of relief. He says so out loud, at cost. He checks every quantity on the station. He has never once checked where a number came from.
Coming soon
Book 6
The Broker's Berth
Nine hours sealed in a cable flat with a man cuffed to a frame, and one order: keep him in, keep the hatch shut. Then the ship goes to action stations without me. No display, no window, no voice on the circuit. I fight the whole engagement through an inch of steel, by counting.
Coming soon
Book 7
Trivet's Count
A Mars pair works the ore mill Trivet over for forty-one minutes and leaves two hands dead. The mill files it as nothing. Isolde Fenn, quartermaster, files the count instead, and the metal recovered off the raft face adds up to a number no raid can explain. A Fracture-era fleet action, complete in one sitting.
Coming soon
Book 8
The Fourth Gun
Number Four is the worst-sited gun on the corvette Tinder, so her crew drills harder than anyone aboard. When a contact runs dark at the edge of an ore volume, answers no challenge, and comes back nil from the registry, doctrine is plain. Fifty-one minutes of the best shooting of their lives. A complete Fracture-era engagement, in one sitting, that turns at the last.
Coming soon