The Series

I thought it was going to be a simple security job.

What belongs here:

In my defense, that's what Arthur told me — and my oldest friend only ever lies to me about the things that matter.

Series framing: a planned 20-book series, Book 1 = The Custodian.

It was a UN mission, the quiet kind: every major power on Earth quietly handed over its very best — the operators whose names never make the news — to go look at something we'd dug up under the Gulf of Mexico. Something older than mankind. Arthur ran the show. I was only there because he trusts me and I speak soldier.

Then the thing under the Gulf woke up.

Thirty-one hours later I was a galaxy from home — a few million light-years, give or take — standing on a dead alien station with a hundred of the deadliest people Earth could field, fifty civilians who'd never fired a shot, and a voice in my head that used to be an entire civilization.

Out here, the galaxy already knows what a human is. Not an explorer. Not a conqueror. Labor. Our kind are property — scattered, broken, bought and sold, the way they've been for ten thousand years.

The way home is shut. The things that own this world are coming back to collect. And the best Earth had to give still fights with actual bullets — which, I'm told, nobody out here has bothered with in about a thousand years.

So. Simple security job.

Let me back up.

The Custodian is Book 1 of a planned 20-book saga — first-person, dry, action-forward, found-family. For readers of Craig Alanson, Jason Anspach, and J.N. Chaney.