Saloa

A century and a half from now, humanity's freest civilisation lives in the dark between planets.

Sixty years ago the Kin answered atrocity with atrocity. A kinetic strike from Earth shattered their first great habitat; they forked a new Klan to carry the responsibility and burned their answer into the planet's surface. Millions died. The survivors withdrew to the outer dark and built a civilisation of rotating habitats and Karavan ships on one non-negotiable rule: their machine partners would be constitutionally incapable of telling a first-degree lie.

Leimeiê has spent those decades raising warriors and keeping her grief decently buried. Then a decoded signal arrives from Saloa. Her husband's cranial Twist, lost with his gun-tug beneath the Arctic Ocean, is still running on its last dribbles of power. It fails, permanently, in just over a year. The diplomats say a rescue would wreck a fragile peace. She ignores them and takes a gun-tug, and begins the nine-month burn down the gravity well towards the world the Kin call Saloa. She knows they will send someone to stop her.

The opening of the Plurality sequence, set 145 years after Singularity's Children. New readers can start here; everyone ends up here eventually.