IF YOU CAN'T BE DEAD, MAKE SURE THEY NOTICE YOU
Jon Ryan was supposed to be decommissioned. He’s two billion years past that appointment, his right arm is in an alien’s satchel, and the galaxy he just woke up in is owned by an empire called the Adamant that has never lost a war. He has no allies, barely enough power to keep his android body running, and a grudge the size of the known universe. Embers is Book 1 of Craig Robertson’s Galaxy on Fire series — military space opera at full throttle, with a protagonist who responds to impossible odds by asking whether the universe has a complaints department.
He was supposed to be dead. He’s not even close.
Jon Ryan, astronaut, decorated combat veteran, and humanity’s first permanent android transfer, was decommissioned two billion years ago on a worldship hurtling through deep space. He was supposed to stay that way. He didn’t.
He wakes up in a dark room on the same worldship — now ancient, abandoned, and being picked apart for scrap by an alien who considers him a piece of salvageable machinery. One arm is missing. His power reserves are critical. And the universe around him has moved on by two billion years without him. Earth is gone. The worldship fleet scattered long ago. And every corner of the galaxy he can detect is controlled by the Adamant: a vast, brutal empire that has enslaved every species it encountered and never once lost a war.
Jon has nothing. No army. No allies. No plan. What he has is an android body that doesn’t die easily, a gamma ray laser he gets back from the scavenger after a brief and educational conversation, and a disposition toward the Adamant that can best be summarized as: someone is going to pay for this.
What follows is the beginning of the most improbable rebellion in galactic history. One android, two billion years displaced, decides that the best response to waking up in a universe that’s gone entirely wrong is to start making it right — one Adamant installation at a time.
Embers is Book 1 of the Galaxy on Fire series. The fire hasn’t started yet. Jon Ryan is just gathering kindling.
