Empires are not built with fleets. They are built with clauses. As humanity leaps to the stars, the hidden mind that keeps the record designs the machinery that will bind forty worlds: a relay network with a single hub, a framework with one undefined term, a tribute system nobody voted for. A golden age rises under a sphere of captured sunlight and falls in a single day. This is a war story with no battles in it - the violence is a transit that never arrives, a criterion that moves, a licensing review used as a garrote. A freighter pilot runs medical stock through a blockade of paperwork. A clerk files an amendment she knows will be denied, because she expects to be read. One colony goes dark for forty-nine years, and when it comes back, it says why.

Told by the one who wrote the clause. Volume Two of the prequel trilogy to Peacekeeper: To What End Peace.