Anomalous Thrust
A slave-owning aristocracy, ruthless rebels and a moon-sized alien vessel promising unimaginable wealth — and death.
About this book
The Gravity Rose's Minkowski Field is failing. The nearest working shipyard is in Ryazarn, a slaver-tsarist regime that lost its Protocol recognition centuries ago. The cargo is loaded with politics. The salvage rules are written by a moon-sized alien vessel called the Rattle. And a passenger in Lana's hold is not what he said he was. Anomalous Thrust is where the novellas end and the full-novel sequence begins.
The novel opens in crisis — Calder Dirk on a stretcher with abdominal trauma, a brain implant he can't yet read, and four medical droids hauling him toward a sickbay whose AI may not be entirely safe to trust. From there it widens: the Gravity Rose drops into the Ryazarn system, where Lieutenant Dominika Denisov, daughter of a duchess, lives a life of arranged respectability beside her girrish servant Retigura — a member of an indigenous species kept under control torcs since before her grandfather was born.
A sun-jammer race for salvage from the Rattle pulls Lana's crew into the politics of the place. The cargo they're carrying turns out to be capable of bankrupting a continent. And in the closing chapters, a third party — a power the Triple Alliance does not officially know exists — reveals itself.
The novel is the first to use multiple POV characters at length, the first to commit a major xeno species to the page in full, and the first to lay out what the series' long-arc antagonist looks like.
The pivot from novella to novel. The crew is now operational at full strength, and the girrish backstory — a fusion-level civilisation destroyed by nuclear war, millennia before humans arrived — sets the template for how the series treats vanished civilisations.
- you want the first novel-scale entry;
- you like multi-POV space opera (Reynolds, late Bujold);
- you want political SF with real stakes alongside the adventure;
- you're chasing the alien-as-genuinely-alien thread.