A Captain shielded by his mother’s rank An enemy determined to buy freedom with blood A battle no one expected to fight. Captain Isaac Gallant is the only son of the dictator of the Confederacy, his career slowed by a dozen measures to protect his reputation and safety alike—but he has no intention of being a pampered child and is determined to do his duty. An attempt to force his crew to acknowledge their own duties puts his ship in a unique position to intervene when an overwhelming rebel attack is launched on one of the Confederacy’s most critical facilities. The rebels didn’t expect to fight anyone. The Confederacy didn’t expect Isaac Gallant to fight at all. All of them were wrong.

A shackled Earth, ruled by an unstoppable tyrant An exiled son, and a one-way trip across the galaxy A perfect world, their last hope for survival Vice Admiral Isaac Gallant is the heir apparent to the First Admiral, the dictator of the Confederacy of Humanity. Unwilling to let his mother's tyranny stand, he joins the rebellion and leads his ships into war against the might of his own nation. Betrayal and failure, however, see Isaac Gallant and his allies captured. Rather than execute her only son, the First Admiral instead decides to exile them, flinging four million dissidents and rebels through a one-shot wormhole to the other end of the galaxy. There, Isaac finds himself forced to keep order and peace as they seek out a new home without becoming the very dictator he fought against—and when that new home turns out to be too perfect to be true, he and his fellow exiles must decide how hard they are prepared to fight for paradise...against the very people who built it.

A dying world, shattered by a broken machine A desperate flight, their only hope for refuge A robotic race, ally and destroyer alike The Republic of Exilium has grown in strength and confidence at the far end of the galaxy from the rest of mankind, sending out scout ships to survey the worlds around them as they try to learn more about the mysterious Construction Matrix AIs. Finding one of the genocidal rogues of that mysterious “race” in the process of destroying an inhabited world, Captain Octavio Catalan takes his ship into a desperate battle. He is victorious—but he is too late. The world of the strange aliens he has encountered is doomed. The distant Republic can barely help, but the honor of their leaders will not permit them to stand idly by. Ships and crews are set into motion to commence a desperate evacuation of their newfound friends, and debts with the strange Matrices are called in. One branch of Matrices destroyed the planet. Another may well save it—but the AIs have their own agenda and the price they ask may be beyond the Republic and its new allies…

A newborn Alliance, forged to stop the destroyers of worlds A potential ally, with secrets hidden by a thousand lies A long-doomed star, whose ruins hold a vital answer. Isaac Lestroud, Admiral of the Exilium Space Fleet, has spent the last three years working with Ambassador Amelie Lestroud to build an alliance against the Rogue Matrices, AIs bent on converting every world into a paradise—regardless of whether anyone lives on it. As Isaac hunts the Rogue that destroyed one of their allies’ homeworlds, Amelie begins negotiations with a potential new ally that could tip the balance. The Governance is a power to rival the human homeworlds the Lestrouds were exiled from—but like those homeworlds, not all is as it seems. And far from the war, Octavio Catalan leads an expedition into the shattered wreckage of the home system of the Matrices’ builders. Among those dead worlds, he hopes to find the answer to the question that haunts the survivors of that race: why did their AIs go genocidally insane?