Publisher Description
After the discovery that the encampment outside of his Safe Zone is full of friendlies, Marc and his group finally have a chance to try to grow stronger again. The addition of an administrator for the Safe Zone as well as someone to coordinate its defenses finally allows Marc to feel like he can go out and do other things.
With the number of survivors they're finding in the immediate area rapidly dwindling, they choose to go farther afield, working on gaining additional resources for the Safe Zone while searching out any remaining survivors they can find.
His father reported passing other Safe Zones on his way back to town so Marc decides some investigation is in order. What he intends is to salvage the ruins of a destroyed Safe Zone his father spotted and offer trade and cordial relations to the surviving one that's closer by. What occurs is not what he intended or expected.
With the possibility of a technology upgrade for his Safe Zone, what appears to be a community of some sort of elves a few miles south of the Safe Zone, and the sneaking suspicion that the System itself is merely a tool for someone, or something, else, Marc isn't quite as free to just do what he wants.
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About Derek Shoales
Les Johnson is a NASA physicist and author. By day, he serves as the senior technical assistant for the Advanced Concepts Office at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In the early 2000s, he was NASA’s manager for interstellar propulsion research and later managed the In-Space Propulsion Technology Project. He is the author of Rescue Mode, coauthored with Ben Bova, as well as Back to the Moon and On to the Asteroid, both coauthored with Travis S. Taylor.