Swords and Spaceships for March 2

Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass travel out to the edge of Teixcalaanli space to take on a new impossible task even as they reel from the upheaval of the empire. An alien armada waits for them, one that no one has been able to communicate with. Failure will guarantee the death of billions. Success will save Teixcalaan, and in so doing allow it to continue its aggressive expansion. (Full disclosure: Arkady and I have the same agent.)

Hester Marley is far from home, stranded injured and indebted on a mining station in the asteroid belt. Her only chance to survive is taking a dead-end security job from the company that owns the station. Then she receives a message from an old friend who claims to have new information about the terrorist attack that injured her… and he winds up dead before they can meet. As she investigates his brutal murder, she soon realizes that finding his killer will unearth secrets about him, her, and the outpost that has been her home–one that very dangerous and powerful people will kill to keep hidden.

A bodyguard witnesses her client being murdered in front of her, and it seems the culprits were the mysterious Machinehood, a terrorist group whose members seem to be part human, part machine. And what the Machinehood wants is an end to the production of the pills humans depend on to allow them to compete with AI in the worldwide gig economy. As pill production slows down, frightened people turn on their bots… and the US government turns to the bodyguard in need of redemption to take the Machinehood down permanently.

When time warriors break time, the end result is a Causality War that no one remembers anything of–not who started it, not who fought in it, and not who ended it. Or maybe almost no one. Because the one who ended it is the lone survivor, and they’ve taken up a new mission: to make sure it never happens again.

Hetty and her husband were Conductors on the Underground Railroad, rescuing countless people from enslavement with their wits, skill, and the magic of the constellations. Now with the Civil War at an end, they use those skills to investigate crimes ignored by the white authorities; this time, it’s the murder of an old friend that promises to unearth long-buried secrets.