Cartographer of the Drift
A Novel of the Uncharted Lanes

About this book:

The Drift isn't a highway—it's a living, breathing river that swallows ships whole and rewrites its own shores overnight. Maren Croft is one of the few cartographers mad enough to chart its unmapped veins, piloting her cutter *Meridian* with nothing but a moody AI named Astraea and a talent for hearing the music in gravitational chaos. When a Hegemony interdictor forces her blind into a null-current graveyard, she finds more than wreckage: a fifty-year-old Imperial jump anchor still ringing its mechanical distress bell, and the hunter-killer drone that followed her through the shear.

Now Maren has forty-eight minutes before the drone completes its sweep, a heat-soaked ship that can't run, and the galaxy's most dangerous secret buried in the station's vault—the war charts that could let the Hegemony drop fleets into the undefended heart of the Free Systems. Or, if she reaches them first, the key to breaking their stranglehold forever.

*Cartographer of the Drift* is white-knuckle space opera at its sharpest: a lone navigator against an empire, an AI partnership that feels more human than most crews, and a universe where the map *is* the territory—and drawing a new line through the dark might be the only way to survive it.