When he finds himself the senior surviving officer of a loyalist Navy unit almost entirely annihilated by rebels, Morane puts in motion a plan he developed long ago. One man, Captain Jonas Morane of the cruiser Vanquish, saw the empire's collapse coming years before the first admiral rebelled. That is if they don't wipe them out entirely from sheer bloodlust or by selling survivors on alien slave markets. The barbarians will gladly steal everything they find and condemn defenseless star systems to technological and demographic collapse. After generations of hard existence on worlds beyond the bounds of human civilization, they hold life cheap, especially that of others. With civil war raging across human space, a Navy torn asunder can no longer protect frontier colonies, and barbarians long confined to the galactic badlands see an opportunity. That rebellion quickly drags the once mighty Imperial Fleet into a devastating fratricidal conflict between factions. The latest in that lineage, an increasingly psychotic empress, is pushing her realm toward catastrophic collapse as admirals and generals rebel against her rule. Humanity's thousand-year-old interstellar empire has been rotting from the inside for over a century, thanks to venal, corrupt, and power-hungry sovereigns from a dynasty many consider illegitimate.
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