Contested Ground (The Terrestrial Coalition Explorations)

CONTESTED GROUND

Commander Michael Morton was supposed to be on leave.

Instead he spent it running alien survey data against human archaeology, and found a bearing. It begins beneath the Giza Plateau and points somewhere very far away.

Whatever is buried under those pyramids was already ancient when the first stone was cut. It has been transmitting the entire time.

For Captain John Henry Littleton and the crew of the TCS United States, that discovery means a long transit into the Perseus arm, and a world at the end of it that isn't a world at all. Something dormant. Something tended. Something that has been waiting a very long time for someone to arrive and ask the right question.

Waking it brings company.

Not all of it is friendly. Not all of it is human. And not all of it comes from anywhere Littleton's sensors can point at.

His crew came out here to answer a question about the past. What they find is a decision about the future — one that cannot be unmade, cannot be delegated, and cannot wait for anyone back home to authorize it.

Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed.

Littleton is going to open this one anyway.

Book Four of The Terrestrial Coalition Explorations