The Thing We Built to End Us (The Saucer Series Book 3)

The oldest records in the solar system are kept at the bottom of Jupiter — in the one dark the machine that hunts them cannot reach.

Engineering fiction: the decisive act is a repair, not a battle.

James Hather is no longer entirely human in the way he was. His friend is no longer broken. And they are done running.

Marked at every step by the patient machine that deletes what it cannot govern, the engineer and the healed ship dive into the crushing dark beneath Jupiter's storms — to a vault older than their hunter, and to its keeper: the last surviving member of a vanished family, alone for a million years, minding a confession. The confession is the truth of everything: who built the machine that judges worlds, why they built it, and what it was meant to protect before it outlived everyone who could tell it to stop.

The keeper offers them survival — a hiding place outside the reach of everything, forever. Certain. Safe. Final. But Earth's clock is hollowing toward a war that will call the machine down at last, and James has read the records to their bitter end: no world has ever been saved by hiding, and no one has ever stood in front of the judge and been heard.

No one, so far, with standing to speak. Because the thing that is coming for Earth was built by family — and James Hather is the family's newest pair of hands.

Book Three of The Saucer Series. The graveyard worlds are next.