Absolute Obedience

Terranaut Mirror Saga Book Two

By: Lennart Lopin

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Absolute Obedience
Terranaut Mirror Saga - Book Two

She has served the most powerful man in the galaxy for four years. She knows his breathing patterns, the pace change when he has already made the decision he appears to be deliberating about, the way his left hand goes still when his face is working to remain composed. She has never thought the word love. She has never needed to. The service was enough. The obedience was enough.

Her name is Mandorla. She is a Queen of the Gray Guard - the elite force that maintains order across humanity's thousand settled worlds. She was selected at twelve, conditioned on a planet whose location is classified, and trained into an instrument of extraordinary precision. She does not question. She does not rebel. She observes, assesses, and serves.

Absolute Obedience tells the story of the Terranauten saga from inside the empire — from the first-person perspective of the woman who enforced its will and understood its logic better than anyone alive. This is not a story about rebellion. It is a story about seeing - about a mind so analytically precise that it can dismantle everyone else's motives with surgical accuracy and completely fail to understand its own.

The empire she serves built a thousand worlds. It feeds billions. Its roads exist. Its water flows. Its solutions work. Whether they are worth what they cost is a question she has been trained not to ask.

She is beginning to ask it.

For readers of:

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, and Iain M. Banks's Culture novels.