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The Guttering Light
Paperback
Series: Reach, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 1 2026
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.76 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The busiest door in human space is starting to fail.
The Lantern is the great junction-anchor of the frontier: a cathedral of vanes holding a fold in space open wide enough for whole worlds to live on the traffic passing through it. Grain ships, colony haulers, migrant barges, ore tenders - a thousand lives and more depend on the light staying steady.
Captain Daniel Cross arrives aboard the ISV Lodestar expecting patrol duty at a miracle that works.
Then a threading window closes early.
No one dies. Not the first time. The boards recover, the traffic keeps moving, and every official number insists the Lantern is healthy. But the people who live with the machine know better. The margins are narrowing. The vanes are drinking power they should not need. And somewhere inside the public record, the truth has already been rounded away.
When sabotage, panic, and politics collide at the crossing, Cross and his crew are forced into the one place every commander fears: between the truth people deserve and the lie that might keep them alive long enough to get through the door.
Because the Lantern can still hold.
But only at a price no one wants written down.
The Guttering Light is Book 2 of The Reach, a hard science fiction frontier adventure set in the wider Fracture Cosmology. It can be read on its own, and continues the story of Captain Cross and the crew of the Lodestar as the first cracks in humanity's golden age begin to show.
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