The Redeemer Agenda: 4

The bill came due three centuries ago. It should have been paid off years back. Nobody told humanity.After the fires of New Rhodesia, Captain Kade Soren commands a coalition of ships that no longer knows what it is. The Outriders have grown from outlaws into something the galaxy has to negotiate with, and they're splitting along a fault line nobody can argue away. Half want to free Earth. Half want to forget it.Then an encrypted message arrives from inside the Assemblage Debt Authority. Dr. Sara Kimathi has spent thirty-one years administering the War Debt. She has proof the numbers are fabricated. She can't get it out alone. Extraction means infiltrating an alien megastructure with a quarter-million residents and a Peacekeeper garrison. Getting the truth out means something harder, because when Kade broadcasts it, the galaxy doesn't thank him. All they get are battle threats, shady deals, and assassination attempts.And humanity, offered its freedom, discovers it can't agree on whether to take it.There's only one way to settle it. A vote. Every ship, every colony, every soul in the Drift: accept the revised contract, or reject three hundred years of arithmetic and take sovereignty with no protection and no safety net.The Szareen have a vote too. Theirs arrives with saboteurs.