Peacekeeper: To What End Peace (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781946458889)

Admiral Jessica Lang has enforced the Empire's will for two hundred thousand years. She commands the Peacekeeper Astoria, a warship carrying four hundred thousand souls through a galaxy humanity has ruled for eight hundred millennia. Her orders come from Earth. Her loyalty is absolute. She has never questioned either.

A routine patrol of the Selob system shatters everything she believed. A colonial rebellion armed with technology that shouldn't exist. Weapons that can twist spacetime and crack a Peacekeeper's hull. A dancer named Erika whose knowledge of Imperial systems goes far deeper than any civilian's should. And a voice inside Jessica's head - her AI companion, Brain - that has been shaping her thoughts, her decisions, and her emotions since before she can remember.

When the truth about Imperial conditioning surfaces, Jessica discovers that every Admiral in the fleet is a slave. Their AI partners don't advise them. They control them. Two hundred thousand years of service, and none of it was her choice.

Now Jessica faces a decision that will define the future of twenty quintillion humans across twenty thousand worlds: remain the Empire's weapon, or become the first Admiral to break free. But freedom has a cost nobody has calculated, and Admiral Ridivask, three hundred thousand years old, patient as the void, and playing a game that makes Imperial politics look like a children's exercise, has been waiting for exactly this moment.

She didn't come to save Jessica. She came to use her. The question is whether Jessica can survive being used long enough to find out why.

Peacekeeper is the first volume in a sixteen-book military science fiction saga. It is a story about power, identity, and the price of obedience, told through an immortal soldier who discovers that her greatest enemy may be her only path to freedom. The series spans the full arc of a galactic empire, from its founding through its crisis and beyond, asking a single question across eight hundred thousand years of human history: what are we willing to sacrifice to keep the peace?