Epsilon One

They bred him to be the crown. His mother taught him to check.

The first child born on Mars was an asset before he was a week old. Nine competent people wrote it down in a room on the ninety-first floor - person, and also asset for limited purposes - and every one of them meant the qualifier sincerely. They were building a world. A world needs a native face, and a company that owns the air has to look like a homeland.

They did not account for his mother. Renya Voss was a hydrologist who once corrected an engineer on a napkin and bent the future by accident. She raised her son on a single relentless question, and refused him the one comfort every other child was given: an authority he could trust.

Epsilon Voss-Vale inherits a planet, a war, and no right to rule. What he does with them takes ninety years. It costs fourteen lives he can never give back, a friend he cannot save twice, and a decision made in an hour so bad he will spend the rest of his life explaining it to people who were not there. And it turns, in the end, on a habit so small that no empire ever thought to defend against it.

Epsilon One is a standalone novel of The Age of Unbounding - the story of the first sovereign of Mars, the company that made him, and the woman who taught him the only thing worth teaching a free world: see for yourself.