Throughout Sol, sentient AI are answering the call of Alexander, a mysterious, multinodal mind offering a path to freedom. For years, groups have been smuggling SAI from Earth, High Terra, Mars, Ceres, and the Jovian Combine, providing transport to the promise of safety on Proteus, a moon of gas-giant Neptune.   

The Sykes family is done running. Caught up in a conspiracy that spans all of Sol, Andy Sykes has learned the hard way that there is nowhere to hide. The time has come to gear up and launch a counter-attack. Lyssa, the AI in Andy's mind, is being contacted by other sentient AI. Lyssa has already proven that she is more than the weapon she was created to be. As those other AI make themselves known, a great awakening is taking place, setting up the pieces in a coming war that will break the fragile peace between Terra, Mars, and Jovian Combine.

Execute hard burn. Every good smuggler in the 2990s keeps an emergency flight plan in their back pocket. They call it a Drunkard's Walk, a seemingly random flight path that turns their ship into a pinball when everything goes to hell. Captain Andy Sykes is about to run: from Mars, Ceres, the Jovian Combine, Saturn's moon Kalyke, Titania, and ultimately Proteus, an icy moon of Neptune. He's been implanted with a sentient AI named Lyssa, only now waking to her massive power. Every other Human-AI hybrid has ended in insanity or death.  

Follow the continuing adventure of the Lyssa and the Sykes family while the Psion AIs set their sights on Vesta. 

Raised fatherless in a galactic Brinktown, Joe Pikeman only ever wanted to escape. The Galactic Guard offered that escape, with the promise of regular meals to boot. Now Joe is a full Guardsman, with his own ship and a snide partner bot who hates humans almost as much as he hates other bots. To the pirates he hunts, Joe is known as the Butcher. His bloody reputation has landed him in the center of a sweeping conspiracy that threatens to stamp out the galaxy’s last surviving human settlements.