Two years ago, Taryn built an open community on a foundation of ancient machines and earned trust. He was fourteen years old, and what he built was real, and it held.
He is sixteen now. He is the Commander of a planetary network spanning a continent, the last direct descendant of the man who prepared this colony for a catastrophe it was never supposed to face, and the only person who can hear the machines well enough to do what is about to be required of him.
Something is coming.
Two ships have entered the outer system. They have found human colonies before. Those colonies are gone. The ships have been searching specifically for worlds like Achillios has become — and, it turns out, something in Achillios has been helping them search. The terraforming program that has been running for two centuries, quietly adjusting the planet's atmosphere toward conditions the ships' passengers prefer, was never doing what the colonists were told it was doing. The plan that Hollis, the colony's founder, prepared for exactly this moment has been sealed for two hundred years and cannot be opened until it is almost too late.
Taryn has three weeks to prepare forty-seven thousand people for something that has never been survived. He has operators who have learned to trust him, a Communications Guild that spans every human settlement on the continent, and an AI that has been waiting two centuries to be useful in precisely this way.
He also has a decision to make — not about the ships, not about the plan, but about what it means to have built something worth protecting and to understand, for the first time, the full cost of what was spent to make it possible.
Verdant is the third and final book of The Achillios Chronicles.
Genre: Science Fiction
He is sixteen now. He is the Commander of a planetary network spanning a continent, the last direct descendant of the man who prepared this colony for a catastrophe it was never supposed to face, and the only person who can hear the machines well enough to do what is about to be required of him.
Something is coming.
Two ships have entered the outer system. They have found human colonies before. Those colonies are gone. The ships have been searching specifically for worlds like Achillios has become — and, it turns out, something in Achillios has been helping them search. The terraforming program that has been running for two centuries, quietly adjusting the planet's atmosphere toward conditions the ships' passengers prefer, was never doing what the colonists were told it was doing. The plan that Hollis, the colony's founder, prepared for exactly this moment has been sealed for two hundred years and cannot be opened until it is almost too late.
Taryn has three weeks to prepare forty-seven thousand people for something that has never been survived. He has operators who have learned to trust him, a Communications Guild that spans every human settlement on the continent, and an AI that has been waiting two centuries to be useful in precisely this way.
He also has a decision to make — not about the ships, not about the plan, but about what it means to have built something worth protecting and to understand, for the first time, the full cost of what was spent to make it possible.
Verdant is the third and final book of The Achillios Chronicles.
Genre: Science Fiction