Crown of Silicon, Book 3
The Rift Protocol
Eighteen thousand employees. A hundred and eighteen billion in annualized revenue. First in the world — and a boundary that has stopped being a communications problem and started being a place.
Elias takes the chief executive's seat on an eighteen-month contract with a removal clause he wrote himself. Nine days later he loses Earth entirely: stranded on the far side of the rift with an expedition of seventy-nine, no operating authority, and a city whose people have had their names taken from them by force.
Three hundred and eighty-two names. One at a time, from pressed marks on the back of erased paper, by a man working on his knees with a lamp on the floor.
It takes longer than winning a war. It is also the only thing that builds something a king cannot inherit — and the only reason, when the boundary finally collapses, that there is anybody on the other side authorized to say stop.
Book Three of Crown of Silicon. The scale turns from a company to a civilization, the romance is finally answered on terms both of them can defend in public, and a system designed to distribute authority meets the one attack it was never designed for.
Complete in four volumes.