Book One • Geometry of Grace
A first-contact space opera about covert war, alien inheritance, and a crew caught in the struggle over something no human power can safely possess.
Sent to extract a scientist from a newly annexed world, Confederate operative Kaid Sidorov expects another deniable mission. Instead, he and his crew uncover evidence of first contact and ignite a covert struggle over what remains of a civilization humanity was never meant to find.
Book 1 stands on its own, but it is also the opening volume of a completed trilogy project.
The Book
Geometry of Grace begins as a deniable retrieval and widens into pursuit, siege, and contact with an intelligence that does not fit human categories. It is space opera driven by consequence as much as spectacle.
When Confederate operative Kaid Sidorov is sent to extract Tavanda Ruun from a newly annexed world, he expects false papers, staged identities, and violence kept just below the level of formal war.
Instead, Ruun leads the crew of the Rebel Ascendant to evidence of first contact: a surviving alien intelligence hidden inside the remains of a civilization that chose torpor over extinction. What they bring back is not a weapon, not a relic, and not something the war can survive unchanged.
As Federation pursuit closes in and safe harbors collapse, the crew must protect something the war is not capable of treating with restraint.
Adult space opera with political fracture, covert operations, first contact, and a crew held together by competence, obligation, and strain.
First contact is treated not as a prize to win, but as a problem of language, faith, strategy, and the human habit of turning every revelation into a tool.
Book 1 works as a full novel on its own while opening onto a larger completed trilogy.
Characters
These notes are brief and spoiler-safe. They are meant as orientation, not explanation.
Confederate operative and field commander
Kaid is a Confederate field operator used to retrievals, deniable violence, and decisions made too quickly to feel clean. He is disciplined, dangerous, and hard to surprise, which is exactly why first contact hits him so hard.
Scientist, analyst, and first-contact witness
Ruun is one of the first people aboard the ship to understand that what the crew has found cannot be filed under strategy, salvage, or intelligence. She is perceptive, rigorous, and difficult to intimidate into false certainty.
Confederate signals analyst
Sam is a self-taught Confederate signals analyst from Agartha, a forgotten and highly defensible hollow world. He brings patience, pattern-reading discipline, and the steadiness that helps the crew understand what is happening before it kills them.
Technical backbone of the crew
Nadira is the person working six problems at once so everyone else stays alive. Fast, exacting, and habitually overcommitted, she solves emergencies by quietly sacrificing any life not organized around work.
Engineer of the Rebel Ascendant and primary pilot
Alex is the man most capable of forcing one more miracle out of the Ascendant because he knows her better than anyone. He has a dry sense of humor, a pilot's instinct for failure, and just enough superstition to take crew betting on which system breaks next personally.
Youngest member of the crew
Goblin is still learning his place in a dangerous world under the guidance of an older crew that has already paid for its competence. He is naturally gifted, especially when the problem turns physical, but raw talent is not enough to carry everything the world will ask of him.
Assassin and close-quarters operator
Nobu has spent most of his life in violence. To escape chaos, he adopts borrowed forms to give himself structure, finding philosophy in gematria, astrology, the I Ching, and historical warfare as if pattern itself might keep a human being intact.
Former attorney and political operator
Pepper abandoned law to serve in the Confederacy. He brings a quiet religious discipline, a lawyer's ear for weakness, and a rare talent for making administrative servants feel like paperwork in their own system.
Alien emissary in partial form
Elesylis is a remnant of a surviving alien intelligence in torpor, chosen to serve as emissary between her civilization and humanity. She exists in our spatial frame as a partial-form construct, built to learn the human condition and interact with our species.
Supporting Figures
These figures widen the book beyond the crew itself without turning the site into a cast encyclopedia.
New Thessalia response coordinator and medic
Joyce is one of the local figures keeping New Thessalia functional. She coordinates response, handles medical triage, and gives the local resistance some of its practical backbone.
Researcher and former collaborator of Tavanda Ruun
Chris Ryan is a former colleague of Ruun. The two split over theoretical orientation, and he still dismisses her later work as “Ruin-theory,” but their history remains intellectually and personally unresolved.
Commander of Agartha
Mira runs Agartha without romanticizing refuge. She reads tactical reality quickly, holds the line when it matters, and gives the station its character as a place of exile, endurance, and earned shelter.
World and Technology
This is an interstellar future with repair debt, regional loyalties, inherited political structures, and hard logistical limits. Distance still matters. Information still arrives late. Power still depends on infrastructure.
Human colonization has continued for generations, producing dozens if not hundreds of inhabited worlds with their own origin stories, local cultures, and political identities. The largest polity is the Federation, centered on Earth and built around ordered, centralized power. Many worlds remain sovereign, and some align through the Confederacy, a military compact much closer to the side of the war this crew actually inhabits.
Faster-than-light travel exists through the Unity drive, which allows ships and relay buoys to move through hyperdimensional space. But realspace information still moves at the speed of light. Communication depends on relay-buoy circuits, routing, delay, and physical infrastructure, so command decisions are constantly being made on different clocks with different information.
Flechette weaponry is common because carbon-fiber alloy shards are cheap to produce, easy to ship, and practical at scale, while traditional gunpowder creates additional logistics problems once everything has to cross space. On rural or less industrial worlds, compressed-gas and air weapons still make sense for the same reason: logistics never stopped mattering.
First contact here is not merely a technology gap or a military opportunity. It unsettles human categories themselves: political, strategic, religious, and moral. What makes the alien presence so dangerous is not only its scale, but how quickly human power tries to turn it into advantage.
Gallery
A curated cross-section of cover work, chapter imagery, and character relationships. This stays selective on purpose.
A first-contact chamber scene at the center of the book's turning point.
Alex and Nadira in the shipboard routine that keeps everyone alive.
The hidden station world of Agartha, hardened into refuge and stronghold.
Ruun and Sam at the edge of signal, interpretation, and discovery.
An image of damage, endurance, and the cost of making it through.
Read a Sample
An early-book excerpt from “Clonmel,” where the crew of the Rebel Ascendant prepares to enter a newly annexed world under false identities.
Retail and direct-purchase links can drop here once launch routing is set.
Captain Kaid Sidorov stood on the bridge of the CSS Rebel Ascendant with the decrypted packet burning on the command glass.
"Clonmel," he said. "Archer wants us off the old route."
That pulled eyes up around the bridge. A voice from the rear answered first. "What, you don't want to spend a week in Earth's newest playpen for managed decline?"
Kaid ignored that. "Says the window's now."
Nadira glanced up from her station. "Looks like we still need the Zephyr package after all."
Nadira had the disguise case up on the console before anybody else started moving. Nobody commented on that either. Alex always staged the ugly work nearest her station, and she always pretended not to notice.
New coordinates rolled through the helm. The Ascendant answered with the familiar flicker through the deck as navigation shifted under Unity, a brief change in pressure and alignment that Kaid felt more than saw. Expected. Clean. The ship taking a new hand on the wheel.
The Rebel Ascendant had always been built to lie for a living. At Zephyr they had pushed that talent further. From a distance she now read as a cheap NGO corvette transport, her paint re-entry peeled, her weapon ports buried under battered skin. Inside, the lie held too: dimmed lighting, scarred panels, interfaces made to look secondhand and overworked.
Archer had not used the buoy tree, the usual relay chain. He had burned a high-speed courier drone to catch the Ascendant between assignments, fast enough to intercept them before the next route locked in. Even encrypted, traffic that moved that way stood out.
"They moved on the planet this week," Kaid said. "We get in before the new systems settle."
"So they're still playing catch-up? Good," Nadira said.
Nobu watched his own altered reflection in a dark panel and bared his teeth at it. "If their intake stack's settled already, the cover story won't even get a turn."
"You say that like notoriety isn't flattering," Pepper said.
"It would be if the file photo were better."
Nadira cracked a smile. Pepper was always quietest in the minute before things got stupid. Kaid had learned to trust that as much as any briefing.
The Rebel Ascendant dropped through Clonmel's atmosphere and settled at the main processing hub of Fidelis with a muted, unremarkable thud. The cargo port yawned open. Security lights washed the landing pad in white glare. Patrol teams in local armor moved people through the starport like insects.
They had arrived as part of an asylum caravan. Ugly, crowded, and easy to vanish inside.
Initial registration passed without friction. Their counterfeit identities held. The first tent line spat them out into the wider transport commons, where new arrivals jostled with locals. It was easy to see who came for Federation promises and who was trying to buy their way off-world before a new reality hardened around them.
A drone dipped low over the line and its rotor wash tugged at their ponchos. Some of the refugees flinched away from it, opening a pocket of empty space around Kaid's team. The drone paused there, as if the sudden geometry itself had made them visible.
Kaid felt sweat run once, cold and straight, down his back.
Then Goblin stiffened, his hand snapping to his throat. "Mask lattice is glitching," he whispered, and his voice lurched with it. His borrowed face began to crawl out of calibration.
"Stall it," Kaid said. "We can't stop here."
Goblin caught himself on Kaid's shoulder and folded inward with ugly, convincing misery. "Can't breathe," he rasped.
Pepper stepped between the officer and the rest of the crew, broad enough to change the conversation simply from his size. He touched where his cross sat under the fabric of his shirt, then slipped into the voice of someone who had spent too long arguing with minor authorities for a living.
The reader cycled once. Twice. Kaid saw the break the way he always did, already running it forward: the first shot, the line breaking wide on fear, the port hardening around them, and the knowledge that if it broke here, he was probably staying behind.
Then the screen kicked back a provisional match and a deferred review. The officer let them through. They kept walking.
Only after the checkpoint fell behind them did Alex speak over comms. "Malware payload rode the genome read. Injected through the sample, spoofed the result. Didn't think it'd hold that long."
They angled off the main drag, found shadows, abandoned the street route, and forced their way into the city's underside. By the time Kaid gathered them around the extraction line, the mission had already become what it always became: a narrow corridor, a bad clock, and a decision made before anyone had time to want better choices.