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The Operator #2
The Operator Races
The old order has weeks left. No one inside it knows.
For a thousand years the Council of Nine has held the Sector frozen: five great empires, ten minor peoples, every dispute iced over by rulings that outlast the civilisations that bring them. Now, at the far edge of everything, an ancient quarantine has quietly dissolved, and a small, quick, unarmed species is about to be seated at the table.
Nine linked stories. Five empires. The last ordinary days.
An envoy of the Basilikon Order prepares for one more ceremony while his empire pays, quarter by quarter, for a war it cannot name. A killer of the Qalat Dominion collects the post he has spent a lifetime earning. A locked-out factor of the Valtic Concord buys the one fortune no one else will bid for. A perfect courtier of the Valorian Bloc is summoned away from the only room he loves. And in a longhouse of the Varengar Thal, a dying leader's heirs sit by the fire and wonder, plainly, what the newcomers will bring.
Between the great powers move the peoples the Council does not count: an exiled mountain king with half a war fleet and an unforgotten homeland; the salvage clans of the Outer Fringe; a leaving race with one last errand; and a farming family whose rightful claim is about to be staked on a promise.
The Operator: nine portraits of a galaxy on the eve of first contact, told entirely from the far side of it. Humanity is a rumour here. The reader knows what is coming. Nobody else does.
For a thousand years the Council of Nine has held the Sector frozen: five great empires, ten minor peoples, every dispute iced over by rulings that outlast the civilisations that bring them. Now, at the far edge of everything, an ancient quarantine has quietly dissolved, and a small, quick, unarmed species is about to be seated at the table.
Nine linked stories. Five empires. The last ordinary days.
An envoy of the Basilikon Order prepares for one more ceremony while his empire pays, quarter by quarter, for a war it cannot name. A killer of the Qalat Dominion collects the post he has spent a lifetime earning. A locked-out factor of the Valtic Concord buys the one fortune no one else will bid for. A perfect courtier of the Valorian Bloc is summoned away from the only room he loves. And in a longhouse of the Varengar Thal, a dying leader's heirs sit by the fire and wonder, plainly, what the newcomers will bring.
Between the great powers move the peoples the Council does not count: an exiled mountain king with half a war fleet and an unforgotten homeland; the salvage clans of the Outer Fringe; a leaving race with one last errand; and a farming family whose rightful claim is about to be staked on a promise.
The Operator: nine portraits of a galaxy on the eve of first contact, told entirely from the far side of it. Humanity is a rumour here. The reader knows what is coming. Nobody else does.
228 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 28, 2026
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August 24, 2026
✍🏾✍🏾✍🏾✍🏾✍🏾
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