Two Democracies

Equality

Harry Robinson lives an idyllic lifestyle. A brilliant computer engineer, he made his fortune pushing the limits of android design. When a neighbouring planet is hit by a global nuclear strike, he feels compelled to help. A chance encounter with a group of offworld soldiers launches him on the trail of the perpetrators.
Prefect Olivia Johnson leads a Legion of disillusioned soldiers from both sides of the civil war. She blames herself for failing to prevent the attack. Now her mission is to hunt for its architect. But first, she must reclaim their adopted home from a different enemy. An enemy who wont even talk.
The Indescribable Joy of Destruction is Johnson's best friend and closest ally. Despite the lives they have saved, artificial intelligences are still the victims of fear and prejudice. The shadowy warship fights to defend the first place it felt accepted, and for equal rights for its kind.

Praise for previous books in the series:
"Where Ancillary Justice Failed to deliver for me, this book succeeded."
"This is what I like, scifi that borders on the believable, like the old Heinlen [sic] stories."
"I'll place these next to my favorite Weber books any day of the week."
"Some of the best written, original scifi I have come across in a long time."
"The writing is clean, effective and powerful, the characters engaging, and the story gripping."

'Equality' is the latest full length novel in the Two Democracies: Revolution series.

Cover art adapted from original work "Spacecraft9" by Caroline Davis. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License.

Extract

Johnson floated free, drifting through the silence of space. One part of her consciousness resided in the Orion, monitoring the activity on the bridge and occasionally conversing with her staffers. Another part of her consciousness, the one she was concentrating on right now, rode along with a combat unit, one of scores flung out hours ago on ballistic trajectories towards Robespierre.
The scans hadn't shown any drastic changes since they'd abandoned the moon all those months ago. Still, she was eager to see what the enemy had done up close.
The first sense of movement was a faint whistle as the upper reaches of the atmosphere tentatively tweaked at the entry shell. The unit began to tumble, the thickening air gripping and releasing it.
Thank goodness there isn't a visual feed. The accelerations are making me dizzy enough.
The tumbling soon abated, the teardrop-shaped shell lining up with the plummet through the denser atmosphere. The temperature readings rose steadily, topping out at one hundred and seven degrees Celsius; lethal to humans but nothing compared to the surface of the shell. The unit vibrated from the roar of the air. Soon the temperature dropped and the roar quietened, the entry shell having decelerated to a terminal velocity of seventy metres per second.
They must have seen us coming by now.
Johnson focused on the part of her on the Orion. There weren't any signs of hostile ships in orbit or any atmospheric craft.
"Permission to launch the dropships?" asked Decurion Ombaru.
"Granted." The sooner they got boots on the ground the better.
Eight of Orion's dropships rippled off the heavy catapults of her flight decks. Four centuries of Legionaries launched in as many seconds, fifty soldiers to a landing craft. Angular combat shuttles left the ships of the Concorde contingent, carrying marines to engage small outposts identified in the survey. The next wave from Orion should be ready in less than a minute. Johnson thought back to her time working a flight deck, the carefully choreographed chaos.
A bang and a hard jolt snapped her attention back to the combat unit. Her heart raced.