The Fracture is a three-way human civil war fought at sublight, where the fastest news is a courier and everything anyone knows is already old. These eight stories go to its far edge, one hull at a time, each told by the person holding the tool. The trade that makes them good at the job is the same trade that hides what they are really doing.
Eight standalone shorts, six chapters and about 13,000 words each, complete in one sitting. No recurring cast, no arc to keep up with, no aliens. The shape is Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected on fair plants, in the register of The Lost Fleet and Battlestar Galactica. They stand beside The Reserve rather than continue it, and can be read in any order.
The Books
Book 1
Two Minutes of Arc
Two months ago she filed a sensor return she could not account for, and it cost her. Now something in the outer arc will not fit the baseline, and Calder has the gate, the log, and a confidence figure.
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Book 2
Reciprocal
Tasking usually reaches the line eleven days old. This packet is nineteen hours: six loaded hulls, a route given as a track, an escort of two. In eleven years Fortitude's captain has been handed a picture this good twice.
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Book 3
Line of Sight
A marking is paint and a code. Both are cheap, and three times Kroll has classified one false and fired. Now a fourth marked hull holds exactly to its filed heading, twenty-six minutes inside her envelope.
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Book 4
The Anchorage
No beacon, no registry entry, no name on any chart: two years of that silence has kept eleven people alive. A hull comes down on one burn and stops nine kilometres off the working face.
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Book 5
Housekeeping
Ninth morning under bombardment, and the air arithmetic will not come out: the banks run dry seventeen hours before relief. Skene has the figure. Now he has to say it in front of the people it belongs to.
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Book 6
The Broker's Berth
The hatch shuts from the outside. Nine hours in a cable flat with a man cuffed to a frame, one order: keep him in. Then the ship goes to action stations, and Thaw's station is here.
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Book 7
Trivet's Count
The book says four hundred and eleven drums; the racks hold four hundred and six. A Mars pair works the mill over for forty-one minutes, and what Isolde has to count afterwards is metal, and two hands.
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Book 8
The Fourth Gun
Worst-sited mount on the corvette Tinder, and mostly nothing to do, so Four drills harder than anyone aboard. A contact runs dark, takes three challenges, answers none, and there are fifty-one minutes before the range is hers.
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