The Doorstep

The war has found the real door.

For months, the coalition has held the frontier together with patched hulls, borrowed trust, and the belief that the enemy must come through the place everyone can see.

The Doorstep is the rally point now: a quiet junction at the head of the map, a threshold no one built doctrine for, and the one place every frightened fleet can still name.

Captain Daniel Cross brings the Lodestar to the line expecting a battle.

Captain Julian Mercer is already there, holding the dark with the survivors of the Endurance and a lattice built around the bones of a ship that should have been allowed to die.

But the first real warning is not an attack. It is an offset. One convoy misplaced. Then another. Then the terrible shape beneath the map becomes clear.

They have not been guarding a door.

They have been guarding one stretch of beach while the whole coast opens.

As coalition fleets, frontier captains, privateers, and old enemies converge on the Doorstep, Cross must hold together an alliance that was barely real before the war reached it - and make command decisions on roads that may no longer lead where they say they do.

The Doorstep is Book 4 of The Reach, a hard science fiction frontier war novel set in the wider Fracture Cosmology. It tells a complete campaign, while carrying the series into the war waiting beyond the frontier.