The Long Game

How you can have a decent space opera if you can't travel faster than the speed of light: Stay in the spaceport, everything will come to you.

Alex has come to the spaceport on Minos following the trail of his long-lost grandfather - who hasn't been heard from for more than 100 years. His family runs a vast interstellar business empire, made possible by the soliton drive. The drive lets you leap across space and time. To you it only seems like an instant, but to everyone else the years go by, as the interest on your investments accumulates.

When Alex's father died and his estate had to be settled, one question needed to be answered: What was the fate of his grandfather. He left on a mission to outer worlds more than fifty light years away and never returned. But that doesn't mean he isn't still out there somewhere, lost in space or time.

Meanwhile, a Zorgon battle fleet is expected to arrive at Minos any day now, forcing Alex to move quickly to find out what happened to his grandfather, while avoiding whatever fate had befallen him.

Part of this novel first appeared in Analog.

"I've done a lot of things that would be really impressive if someone else had done them."
Daniel Hatch is a veteran science fiction writer whose stories have appeared in Analog and elsewhere since 1990. 
He served four years in the U.S. Coast Guard and is a graduate of the University of Connecticut with a degree in journalism. He has 40 years of experience as a reporter and an editor, including work for the Hartford Courant, the Connecticut State News Bureau, the New York Times, and 35 years at the Journal Inquirer. He now works for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group, which bought the Journal Inquirer in 2023. 
As a reporter, he covered the 1980 presidential campaign and the first space shuttle launch and interviewed Ben Bova, Paul Newman, and Buzz Aldrin.