The Arkanar Accord (The Anvil Series Book 2)

"The Eclipse came out of the jump and the graveyard was already there."Twenty-three ships, adrift and powered. Crews absent — not dead, simply gone. And at the center of it, a Forgeborn vessel forty thousand years old, still running, carrying a record that should not have survived.Inside it: a weapon built before human civilization existed, designed for a single use. And an AI named Echo — forty thousand years old, damaged, exact — who has been waiting long enough to know precisely what the weapon does to the person who fires it.Admiral Aric Kade has been bonded to the Forgeborn warship Eclipse for seventeen months. The integration has already changed him in ways that don't reverse. What the Vaeloris's record contains is that the weapon makes those changes permanent.The Harbinger is not a natural phenomenon. It has preferences. It erases civilizations and removes the evidence. It has been doing this for forty thousand years, and it is not indifferent — it has noticed the transmission that drew the Eclipse here.A coalition is forming. Every surviving species within range. Every ship that can reach the accord. There is an eleven-hour window in a forty-thousand-year cycle. The window is closing.The cost is known. The question is whether knowing changes anything.The Arkanar Accord is the second book in The Anvil Series. It follows The Obsidian Eclipse. Read more