The Collapsing Empire

Humanity lives spread across a chain of worlds called the Interdependency, and no single world can feed or sustain itself. The Flow, an extradimensional network, carries ships between them faster than light and keeps trade moving. The whole arrangement rests on the idea that every world needs the others.

Physicist Marce Claremont finds that the Flow is shifting. Soon it will cut every connected world off from the rest. His warning reaches the capital at the same moment the long-reigning emperor dies.

The throne passes to his daughter, Cardenia, who never expected to rule. She inherits a political order built around a route of travel that is about to disappear, and a mercantile family that cannot be trusted.

Far from her, starship captain Kiva Lagos is drawn into the same crisis from the opposite edge of known space. The book is a space opera with court intrigue, science-based stakes and a wry comic tone. It opens the Interdependency series, and its question is what a civilization does when its only road is closing.