The Burning Lanes

The Causeway is the chokepoint that controls a whole deep-frontier region, and Captain Daniel Cross has been handed the mission of his life: a joint goodwill expedition — centre, frontier, and the Nhál under one banner — to certify it open and prove the roads can be shared. It is everything he believes in, and it goes beautifully. But every place the expedition opens, it also makes worth taking; and to hold the fragile coalition together, Cross reaches for a little more control — and learns too late that the peace he is securing and the war he is arming are the same act.

The Reach is the action-adventure thread of the Fracture Cosmology — a five-book frontier fleet saga. The Burning Lanes is Book 3: a complete, standalone adventure that rewards readers coming up through the series. Best entered from The Reach, Book 1 (The Wrong Number). The cosmology has many doors and no required reading order; other good first books are The Signal, Cohort, and Wide Sky.