As the slave masters of Mesa plot against the Star Empire of Manicore and the newly liberated slave planet of Torch, secret agent Anton Zilwicki investigates a wave of mysterious assassinations.

When the leaders and soldiers of the tiny island of Charis rise up behind cybernetic avatar Merlin to defend their home, a powerful Church of God Awaiting, pushed to the brink of defeat, draws on its formidable resources and forbidden technologies in an ultimate battle between freedom and oppression.

Those on the side of progressing humanity through advanced technology have finally triumphed over their oppressors.The unholy war between the small but mighty island realm of Charis and the radical, luddite Church of God's Awaiting has finally come to an end. However, even though a provisional veil of peace has fallen over human colonies, many secrets of Safehold's past still remain unearthed. With new alliances forged and old regimes fractured, Merlin--the...

"Doctor Benjamin Schroder was a history teacher until a psychotic episode turned his world upside down. Benjamin now had memories, not just of his own life, but of an entire ghastly world where millions of civilians had been systematically slaughtered in 'extermination camps,' there is still a Soviet Union, the Korean Peninsula is divided, thousands of nuclear warheads spread their threat across Earth and the Middle East was a festering sore of bloodshed,...

"For more than fifty years, the Terran Republic and the Terran League have been killing one another. The death toll has climbed ever higher, year after year, with no end in sight. But the members of the Five Hundred, the social elite of the Republic's Heart Worlds, don't care. Their star systems are light-years from any threat of attack. Their children are sheltered from the "mandatory service" that falls so heavily on the Fringe Worlds' backs. Their...

"We've come a long way in the forty years since the Shongairi attacked Earth, killed half its people, and then were driven away by an alliance of humans with the other sentient bipeds who inhabit our planet. But it also transpires that the Shongairi expedition that nearly destroyed our home planet ... wasn't an official one. That, indeed, its commander may have been acting as an unwitting cats-paw for the Founders, the ancient alliance of very old,...