AMY DUBOFF

Jason Sietinen lives in the shadow of his father—legendary war hero, inventor, dynastic heir, and TSS High Commander Wil Sietinen—and his mother, TSS Lead Agent Saera Alexri. Raised on the isolated Taran colony world of Earth, Jason didn’t learn about his highborn lineage or the galaxy-spanning Taran Empire until he was sixteen. Now, a decade later, he’s become a notable TSS Agent in his own right, living at TSS Headquarters inside Earth’s moon.

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While Jason pursued a career in the Tararian Selective Service, his twin sister Raena, moved to the Empire’s capital planet, Tararia, to train as a scion to the influential Sietinen Dynasty, one of the seven High Dynasties on the High Council overseeing the Empire. Her husband, Ryan Dainetris, is the sole heir to the Dainetris Dynasty and its corporation, DGE. They have made a good life with each other on Morningstar Isle, the former stronghold of the sinister Priesthood of the Cadicle that ruled the Taran Empire until five years ago.

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The Priesthood perpetrated great atrocities on Taran citizens over their millennium of governance, including mass genetic experimentations that led to the creation of the Generation Cycle—a corruption of the telepathic and telekinetic abilities now found in only a tenth of Tarans. The centuries of corrupt leadership have left many Taran citizens distrustful of Taran leadership, and the High Council is working hard to regain public confidence.

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One day, while on a training run with his flight students, Jason is overcome with a profound sense of foreboding—a resurgence of a past premonition about a darkness on the horizon. When he speaks about the incident with his father, he learns that there has been a mysterious attack on a salvage ship, the Andvari, in the remote area of the galaxy near a spatial anomaly known as the Rift. This tear in the fabric of spacetime was left over from the Bakzen War, a centuries-long conflict with a telekinetically gifted race.

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When Jason interviews the sole survivor of the Andvari, Darin, he learns that the ship was attacked by a transdimensional being of immense power. It appears the entity was studying the salvage crew, though no one knew to what end.

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Wil connects the attack to an incident several months prior, where the TSS encountered another alien race known as the Gatekeepers. The Gatekeepers warned that Tarans had violated an ancient treaty, and that the race in the agreement would not forgive the transgression. No one in the Empire’s leadership—not even the long-lived and powerful Oracles among the Aesir—remembered the details of the treaty, but Wil makes it his mission to track down the original document.

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Wil and Saera take a trip to Morningstar Isle on Tararia, hoping to find reference to the treaty in the Priesthood’s records that are still stored in the underground facility beneath their daughter’s estate. They meet up with Wil’s parents, Cris and Kate, who now lead the Sietinen Dynasty and family business, SiNavTech. While searching the estate, the group locates an ancient crystal tablet that they determine is the original treaty. It explicitly states that Gate technology is forbidden and violating the terms is punishable by the elimination of the Taran race.

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Since the treaty violation was perpetrated by a rogue faction within the Taran Empire who got hold of the Gatekeeper’s ancient tech, Wil hopes to be able to negotiate with the other transdimensional aliens once they make an appearance. It was an honest mistake, and no harm was meant.

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Jason is concerned about the aliens potentially coming through the dimensional veil, and he’s torn when his longtime friend and lover, Tiff, says she’s taking a new assignment that will bring her to a post near the Rift. He’ll miss her after spending nine years together, but he respects her desire to forge her own path.

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Shortly after Tiff leaves for her new post on Alkeer Station, the TSS is alerted to a strange spatial anomaly spanning from the Rift to that very base. Wil and Jason rush to Alkeer on the TSS flagship, the Conquest, to investigate and perhaps make contact with the aliens.

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Before they can figure out how to communicate, the Alkeer Station is ‘un-made’ in a matter of seconds—as if broken apart at the subatomic level like it never even existed. Jason is devastated by Tiff’s death, especially having been in direct telepathic contact with her when she was disintegrated along with the rest of the station.

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Wil and Saera begin plotting their response to the act of aggression, realizing that none of their defenses can stand up to this sort of attack. Nonetheless, word will spread, so they need to look like they’re doing something. They decide to bring Earth formally into the Taran fold so they can install a planetary shield that will hopefully also offer additional protection for TSS Headquarters in the moon; they need a secure base of operations if they’ll have any chance.

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Having been raised on Earth, Raena is selected as the ambassador to Earth, and she travels to the planet with Wil and Jason to make first contact. To everyone’s surprise, the meeting goes well.

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However, more disruption is brewing in the Outer Colonies. On the planet Duronis, Lexi Karis has been working with an organization known as the Sovereign Peoples Alliance. They claim to want independence from Tararian rule, but Lexi has begun to suspect that they’re more akin to a terrorist group. She believes that her friend, Melisa, joined the Alliance and disappeared. She thinks it might be because Melisa was open about her Gifts, so Lexi has kept her telepathic and telekinetic abilities carefully hidden.

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Lexi places a call for help to the TSS, worried that the Alliance is planning something terrible. Though she had hoped for backup to arrive, she must take action herself when she learns of a plot to attack two large cargo ships and seize the spaceport on Duronis. She takes out the Alliance’s control room with telekinesis and manages to make an escape. As she’s escaping the scene, she encounters Kira Elsar, a Tararian Guard officer that the TSS has arranged to send undercover, with Jason as her handler, to help Lexi uncover the Alliance’s broader activities with an organization known as the Coalition. Kira is uniquely equipped for the investigation, as a telepath who has been augmented with alien nanotech and is also paired with a sentient AI named Jasmine.

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The situation with the transdimensional aliens comes to a head when a spatial anomaly forms around Tararia itself and the immense beings start to come through the dimensional veil. Wil, Saera, and Jason race to Tararia with desperate hope of making contact this time. Raena and Ryan join them on the Conquest. Even the ship’s advanced telekinetic energy-focusing weapon can’t stand up to these beings encircling the planet; diplomacy is the only option.

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Wil devises a way to send a written message, using the text from the original treaty inscribed on crystal as a translation cypher. The aliens respond and give an incomprehensible name of their race, so Raena suggests the nickname ‘Erebus’. Wil, Jason, and Raena astral project to talk with the Erebus and explain the misunderstanding. The Erebus eventually agree to negotiate a new peace, and a representative manifests in the Conquest’s Command Center.

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The Erebus representative offers Tarans a ‘gift’—a new power core design. The tech is exponentially more powerful than the current model produced by Monsari Power Solutions. It is suspected that MPS is running out of the voydite material needed to manufacture their power cores, so this new design is a little bit too perfect and timely.

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Nonetheless, the TSS and Taran leaders aren’t in a position to turn down the offer. They strike a tentative peace with the Erebus and prepare to move forward. Except, the TSS won’t forget what happened to Alkeer Station. They know a future conflict is coming, both with the Erebus and more civil disruption. For now, all they can do is prepare to fight for their survival.