Crown of Silicon, Book 2
The Aether Engine
Twelve hundred employees. A three-billion-dollar valuation. And a shareholder who understands exactly how the company works, because he helped build it.
Elias Voss is Chief Operating Officer now. The authority is real — and so is the discovery that every level he climbs takes another decision out of his hands. A king could sign. An executive has to convince a board, a works council, a regulator, and a supplier who is entirely within his rights to say no.
Across the boundary, a prisoner Elias sealed himself is still alive and still holding a line that twenty-seven other prisoners are standing behind. And the man who murdered him three thousand years ago has decided, at last, that it is time to talk.
Axiom can survive a hostile acquisition. What it may not survive is being told — correctly, in a public filing, by someone who is not wrong — that its safety depends on one irreplaceable person.
Book Two of Crown of Silicon. A slow-burn escalation of scale and stakes, in which the villain makes his best argument and it lands, the romance advances by explicit agreement rather than accident, and the smartest people in two worlds discover that a rescue is a supply-chain problem.
Complete in four volumes.