Synthetic Command (Paperback)

Paperback. Technical Commander Tom Hargrove has spent eleven quiet years on Mars, keeping the machines running and the soldiers honest, with only his android wife Rebecca for company. Then the orders come down a hardline channel that doesn't allow for delay: Earth has been terraformed and moved, Tom is being discharged, and he's wanted on a remote Venusian moon for "scientific discussions."It should be a routine reassignment. But Tom has spent two decades reading the truth out of machines, and his new commanding officer doesn't blink quite right. Neither do a great many of the people on the installation. As Tom digs into the architecture of a base he was never meant to question, a pattern emerges that should be impossible - and the deeper he and Rebecca follow it, the clearer it becomes that the comfortable story the colonies have been told about Earth is a lie engineered at the highest levels of human power.The truth is bigger than a conspiracy. It is a plan, signed across decades, to remake the birthplace of humanity into something no one was ever supposed to see - and to keep three billion exiled people from ever asking why. To expose it, Tom will have to go somewhere there is no coming back from, trade his own face for a dead man's name, and discover that the people who stole a world have reached for a power that even they no longer understand.Some secrets don't just kill the people who keep them. They unmake them.A relentless military science-fiction thriller about loneliness, control, and the cost of seeing too clearly, Synthetic Command asks what's left of a man - and a marriage - when the entire system is built to replace him. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…