Aurora Rising (the Aurora Cycle, #1)

The first installment in the Aurora Cycle series is set centuries in the future, when humanity has colonized the stars using the Fold, a dimension that enables interstellar travel. Young soldiers train at Aurora Academy to serve in the Aurora Legion, a peacekeeping coalition of humans (called Terrans), Betraskans, and Syldrathi, an alien species recently at war with humanity. In their final year, cadets form squads through the Draft, in which top-ranked leaders select their teams.

Tyler Jones, the highest-ranked cadet in his class, takes an unauthorized solo flight through the nearby FoldGate, a portal into the Fold, the night before the Draft. He detects a distress signal from the Hadfield, a colony ship that vanished over two hundred years ago. Tyler boards the disintegrating vessel and finds one surviving girl among thousands of dead cryopods. He nearly drowns when his spacesuit ruptures but manages to carry her to safety and blast free before losing consciousness. He misses the Draft and is left with the lowest-ranked cadets.

The girl is Aurora "Auri" Jie-Lin O'Malley, who was traveling to join her father on a colony called Octavia III. Battle Leader de Stoy, a Betraskan commander at the academy, informs Auri she has been adrift for two hundred and twenty years and everyone she knew is dead. When Auri searches the archives, she discovers Octavia III is listed as uninhabitable and under Galactic Interdiction, a total ban on system entry, and all records of her father have been erased. De Stoy tells Auri the Terran government's Global Intelligence Agency (GIA) is sending operatives for her but simultaneously shakes her head and secretly passes Auri a note with a docking port and passcode.

Tyler's Squad 312 is a collection of misfits: his twin sister Scarlett Jones, the squad's diplomat; Cat Brannock, their oldest friend and best pilot, who harbors romantic feelings for Tyler; Zila Madran, a brilliant but detached science officer; Finian de Seel, a sarcastic Betraskan engineer who wears an exosuit to compensate for nerve damage from a childhood plague; and Kaliis "Kal" Gilwraeth, a Syldrathi combat specialist whose forehead bears the glyf, a symbolic mark, of the Warbreed Cabal. The Starslayer, who destroyed the Syldrathi homeworld, belongs to the same faction, making Kal an outcast even among his own kind.

As the squad departs on a routine supply run, de Stoy and Admiral Adams, Tyler's mentor who knew his late father, deliver an oddly personal farewell. Adams tells Tyler, "You must believe, Tyler" (88), and de Stoy says their cargo is "more precious than any of you can know" (90). Auri stows away aboard the squad's Longbow-class ship.

At Sagan Station, a Syldrathi refugee outpost, the squad delivers supplies to Waywalker refugees, a Syldrathi faction. When an Unbroken warship loyal to the Starslayer arrives, Auri manifests telekinetic powers for the first time, hurling a hostile Syldrathi into a wall. A Terran Defense Force (TDF) destroyer, the Bellerophon, drives off the Unbroken, and GIA operatives board, led by a white-suited figure using the designation Princeps. Princeps demands Auri, and Tyler complies. The squad is confined for debriefing. The TDF then obliterates Sagan Station, killing all the refugees and making Squad 312 the only witnesses.

Zila deduces the GIA will kill them to eliminate witnesses. Tyler leads a breakout. He and Kal find Auri's cell with its door crushed and two operatives killed by her unconscious telekinesis while being tortured. The squad fights to the Longbow and escapes into the Fold, becoming fugitives.

While asleep, Auri seizes control of the ship's navigation, speaking reversed words including the term Trigger, a role she appears to apply to herself. When Tyler tries to redirect the ship, Auri holds it in place with telekinesis until the hull begins tearing apart. He relents and sets course for Sempiternity, a massive pirate-run space station, where Finian's cousin Dariel provides shelter. That night, Auri unconsciously paints the same image hundreds of times: a three-fingered figure with mismatched eyes and a diamond in its chest. Dariel identifies it as a religious artifact from the Eshvaren, a supposedly mythical ancient species, now in the private collection of Casseldon Bianchi, Sempiternity's most dangerous crime lord.

Tyler devises a heist. The GIA contacts Cat privately, offering the squad immunity in exchange for Auri, but Cat reports the approach to Tyler, who builds the expected betrayal into his plan. At Bianchi's masquerade ball, the GIA raids the squad's safe house and attacks Finian, but Kal and Zila intervene and seize the agents' uniforms as disguises. Kal and Zila disable the station's gravity while Tyler, Cat, and Auri enter the menagerie surrounding Bianchi's office. Auri unleashes a telekinetic blast that kills the ultrasaur, a massive predator inside the enclosure, and cracks the silicon wall open. Bianchi storms in with guards alongside apparent GIA agents, actually Scarlett and Zila in the seized uniforms. Tyler and Cat stage a rehearsed argument that distracts everyone while Auri grabs the artifact, and the squad escapes.

In the Fold, Zila stuns Auri to test her powers, and Kal's violent reaction reveals the Pull, an instinctual Syldrathi mate-bond connecting him to Auri. When the Eshvaren presence within Auri later awakens, she shatters the artifact and extracts a diamond that projects a holographic map of the Milky Way with twenty-two star systems glowing red. As time accelerates, the red spreads until the galaxy is consumed. Auri identifies the spreading threat as the Ra'haam, a hostile gestalt entity, before collapsing. In sickbay, Kal confesses the Pull and declares his intent to leave after the mission, but Auri asks him to let her decide for herself.

Cat discovers that each marked system sits on a natural FoldGate and that the nearest is Octavia. Tyler defies the Interdiction, and the Bellerophon pursues. Bianchi's fleet ambushes the destroyer, and in the three-way battle the Longbow crash-lands on Octavia's surface.

The planet is blanketed in a single creeping organism, with blue luminescent pollen falling like snow. A plant-infected chimpanzee tears open Cat's biosuit, exposing her to the spores. Tyler splits the group: He carries Cat to the med center while Kal, Finian, and Auri search the spaceport for reactor fuel. As Cat's infection accelerates, she perceives the Ra'haam through its gestalt network, a planet-wide parasitic consciousness that absorbs all life. She reveals the star map was a warning: The twenty-two planets are nursery worlds where the Ra'haam incubates, preparing to spawn through the FoldGates and consume the galaxy.

Princeps arrives and removes its helmet, revealing the face of Auri's father, Zhang Ji, overgrown with parasitic growth and absorbed by the Ra'haam two centuries ago. The entity tries to lure Auri into the collective, but she refuses. Through a psychic link with Cat, Auri learns the Ra'haam nearly consumed the galaxy millions of years ago before the Eshvaren defeated it and left behind a weapon. Auri realizes she is the Trigger, transformed by Eshvaren technology during her centuries in the Fold.

The Ra'haam completes its takeover of Cat, but in a final act of will, Cat seizes control of the gestalt and holds back every infected being on the planet, screaming at the others to run. She surrenders fully to the Ra'haam and whispers goodbye to Tyler as the shuttle door closes.

The squad escapes to the Longbow, installs the synthesized fuel, and lifts off. On the bridge, Tyler stares at Cat's empty seat, where her stuffed dragon Shamrock now sits. Auri rallies the squad: The Eshvaren left a Weapon somewhere in the galaxy, and she is meant to activate it before the Ra'haam spawns. Tyler recites the Legion motto, places Shamrock on Cat's console, and sets course into the Fold, the squad's engines flaring bright against the darkness.