Ten days out of every thirty, physicist Julian Class lies jacked mind-to-mind with nine other soldiers, running a soldierboy — a remote-controlled war machine hunting rebels in the Costa Rican cloud forest. The Ngumi War is twelve years old, fought by the automated haves against the have-nots, and the side that cannot lose it also…

Carmen Dula never asked to go to Mars. Dragged off Earth at eighteen by her mother’s lottery win, she endures two weeks up a space elevator, six months in a converted fuel tank, and a colony administrator who despises her on sight — then breaks the one rule that matters: never go out alone. Kilometers…

Matt Fuller — broke, dumped, about to be fired from his MIT lab job — presses RESET on a calibrator he built himself, and the box vanishes for a second. The next push, ten seconds. Each jump runs twelve times longer than the last, it only goes forward, and it cannot be steered. Then a…