The Shattering Peace

Set in John Scalzi's Old Man's War universe, where humanity's Colonial Union competes with alien civilizations for habitable planets, this novel follows Gretchen Trujillo, a diplomatic analyst whose desk job thrusts her into a crisis that could shatter the fragile peace among three interstellar powers.

Gretchen runs the analysis desk for the Obin, an alien species allied with humanity, at the Colonial Union State Department on the planet Phoenix. The Obin, originally uplifted from near-animal intelligence by the Consu, a vastly more advanced alien species, millennia ago and later given artificial consciousness through Colonial Union technology, are almost incapable of deception, making Gretchen's desk a low-priority assignment. Her assistant is an Obin named Ran, secretly a highly trained combat specialist assigned to protect Gretchen. Gretchen's close friendship with Zoë Boutin-Perry, a figure of near-religious importance to the Obin, makes Gretchen culturally significant to the species.

Senior officials summon Gretchen to reveal a secret. The Tripartite Agreement, a treaty between the Colonial Union, the alien government called the Conclave, and Earth, paused colonization to prevent war. Despite this, the three parties secretly created a test colony called Unity. Housed on an Obin-abandoned asteroid station in the Karna-Hlaven system, Unity held 50,000 inhabitants testing multispecies coexistence. Two days ago, Unity vanished: no debris, no gravitational trace, no sign of destruction. Gretchen's father, Representative Manfred Trujillo, privately reveals that her ex-boyfriend, Dr. Magdy Metwalli, is among the missing colonists. Gretchen agrees to join the covert recovery mission. Before departing, Deputy Ambassador Clock at the Obin embassy informs her that the Consu, a species so technologically advanced as to be incomprehensible to all others, were spotted in the Karna-Hlaven system weeks before Unity's disappearance.

The mission travels aboard an Obin ship with delegations from the Colonial Union, Earth, and the Conclave, the last represented by a species called the Garvinn. Caspar Merrin, head of the Colonial Union contingent, tasks Gretchen with gathering intelligence on all groups. When the ship arrives at Karna-Hlaven, Unity is gone. Scans confirm no debris and no anomalies. Earth scientist Bethany Young discovers a cloaked object near Unity's last known position: a featureless gray prism made of material matching the Consu carapace.

Gretchen examines the prism aboard ship and knocks on its surface in frustration. A seam appears. Inside is a living Consu who refuses to give its name; Gretchen dubs it "Kitty." Kitty explains it was on a sacred death journey and that the prism houses a skip drive—a device enabling instantaneous travel between star systems—of entirely new design. Heretic Consu are coming to seize both the drive and the knowledge to operate it. Kitty offers a deal: Protect it from the heretics, and it will reveal what happened to Unity. Alarms sound immediately.

A dozen Consu board the ship, and a sapper field, a device that neutralizes energy weapons, causes the defenders' rifles to explode. Through sacrifice and improvisation, the crew fights back: The Garvinn lure six Consu into a cargo hold and blow them into space, while Ran storms the Consu transport to disable the sapper field. With gravity cycling at Gretchen's command, the remaining Consu are disoriented and shot down. Gretchen tackles the last heretic to prevent it from reaching Kitty, is slashed from belly to sternum, and kills it by manipulating the artificial gravity before losing consciousness.

Gretchen awakens in Unity Colony's hospital with Magdy as her doctor. From the colony's perspective, they never moved; they simply stopped receiving communications two weeks ago. Kitty refuses to speak to anyone but Gretchen. Colony physicists dismiss her claim that Unity was skipped to a different universe, but Councilwoman Haimi Bava, an Earth representative on the colony council, orders them to prove or disprove it mathematically, warning the colony will starve if Gretchen is right.

Gretchen places a surviving heretic Consu she names "Bacon" in the same cargo hold as Kitty and records their arguments with hidden devices. Scientists determine that Kitty and Bacon were likely lovers, that Kitty deliberately betrayed Bacon's faction, and that both are attempting ritual deaths while sabotaging each other. Young discovers 128 cloaked skip drive satellites orbiting the asteroid, the "chain drive" that moved the entire colony. Analysis of a retrieved satellite and scans of dead Consu reveal technology far beyond anything known, including auxiliary brain matter distributed throughout Consu bodies that structurally resembles Obin brains.

Kitty explains "cusps," existential cultural wars within the Consu that determine the species' direction. Kitty alone developed the new physics and pretended to join Bacon's faction to waste their resources before sabotaging their plan. Bacon reveals the intended target: Unity Colony was to be skipped into Earth's orbital path, destroying 11 billion people to fracture the Tripartite Agreement and force lesser species back into the conflict the Consu believe necessary for "perfection."

Kitty proposes a final deal. Gretchen must return to their original universe to deliver a cobalt blue disk, an unrefusable summons in Consu culture, to Bacon's parent. In exchange, Kitty will encode skip drive operating instructions into Ran's brain via its consciousness harness, the implanted device that grants the Obin their artificial awareness. The encoding will self-destruct after two uses, meaning Ran will die upon completing the return trip. Gretchen objects, but Ran accepts: one life for 50,000.

After a final night with Magdy, Gretchen, Ran, and Bacon skip back to Phoenix. Gretchen reveals everything in debriefings: the Consu civil war, the intended destruction of Earth, and the new physics. Colonel Bridgers of the Colonial Defense Forces and Earth representative Mateu Jordi both attempt to seize the disk, but Gretchen anticipates and foils them. The Consu arrive with 732 ships, retrieve Bacon and the command module, and confirm Gretchen as the disk's bearer.

During the tense wait on Phoenix Station, Ran accidentally reveals it does not expect to die. When Kitty used the consciousness harness as an interface, the harness's daily cache stored all programming actions, which Ran sequestered and the Obin downloaded. Clock confirms the cached programming is fully operable from the harness, bypassing the lethal brain encoding. Gretchen weeps with relief but recognizes the strategic implications: The Obin now possess a working model of the new skip physics.

Gretchen is summoned to a Consu ship and meets Bacon's parent, whom she names "Fluffy." The disk is a "life command and demand," the most binding directive in Consu culture: Kitty has bequeathed its entire identity to Gretchen, making her the first non-Consu ever designated as Consu, meaning "those who understand." As Kitty's heir, she must settle the dispute through single combat. If she wins, she keeps Kitty's technology; if Fluffy wins, it gains the new physics. Forfeiting means death, and fleeing means abandoning humanity.

At the duel, Gretchen declines all offered weapons. When the signal comes, she declares Fluffy already dead and sprints with Ran into Kitty's command module, claiming it as her weapon. Ran uses it to skip Fluffy's entire ship into an uninhabited universe, stranding it permanently. From a pre-positioned Obin vessel, Gretchen commands the Consu fleet to leave. Over the following days, all 732 ships depart.

Over 10 days, Gretchen and Ran skip stockpiled cargo ships to Unity's universe, then return to the colony one final time. After a final exchange with Kitty, Gretchen has the module's skip drive disabled; both Kitty and the module are ejected into space.

In a colony-wide broadcast, Gretchen announces that Unity Colony cannot return home. The technology that brought them here was designed as a weapon, and the only way to prevent its future use is to strand it, and themselves, permanently. She reveals that the chain drive has moved the asteroid into orbit around a planet that is, in this otherwise uninhabited universe, Earth itself: a whole world with everything they need. Dozens of cargo ships carry supplies to build a new civilization. Reuniting with Magdy, Gretchen argues that their total isolation, with no Colonial Union, no Conclave, and no other intelligent life, leaves cooperation as the only viable path. The planet below them is Earth, their new home.