Logistical Mandate

One act of survival. An endless cascade of consequences. Over millennia of sub-light expansion into the galaxy, the totalitarian Human Directorate emerged to rule much of humanity's vast interstellar empire. Its rule is defined by a single, brutal formula: identify social entropy, and eliminate it at any cost. Liu Yang was a loyal officer of the interstellar fleet. But loyalty means little when a political auditor unexpectedly seized control of his battlecruiser via the crew's Neuronet implants and forced them to enact a monstrous order. Caught between atrocity and death, Liu and the crew have only one move left: a desperate crime in the name of self-preservation. But survival demands consequences. Each advance exacts a steeper toll. There are no clean victories, only the compounding cost of survival within the political machine. There is no escape, only a choice in the nature of your cage. Novella: Separated from Liu Yang by decades and light-years, his estranged daughter Luo Xixi is suffocating in a dead-end welfare job. To escape crushing boredom and the shame of living off her father's service payout, she decides to gamble her fate on a one-way colonial assignment. But she finds that at the frontier, the Directorate's weakening rule leads to not freedom, but barbarism and cruelty. There is no escape, only a change in the nature of your cage.