TACE Year 1 Thean Academy of Command and Exploration

Some lessons aren’t on the syllabus.

Lira and her fellow cadets arrive at the Thean Academy of Command and Exploration to prepare for Fleet service. What awaits them is more than demanding training: fierce rivalries, friendships tested under pressure, political intrigue, and a discovery beneath the Academy that powerful people want to control.

They left Earth to build a better future. They arrived to find one already waiting.

Centuries after humanity’s escape from a collapsing Earth, the colony on Trappist-1E has become something Earth never intended. In the north, kingdoms, sailing ships and a powerful church rule a medieval society where technology is feared. Far to the south, the settlement of Windsong has kept the science everyone else abandoned.

Then the Benevolence arrives. Admiral Casey Elias and his crew came to lead humanity’s future, but their technology and medicine threaten an order that has held for centuries. Was this world built to protect humanity, or to control it?

What kind of world should they build, and who gets to decide?

After the Benevolence launched, a second ship left quietly: the ESF Escape. It carried no trained settlers, only Earth’s privileged elite. Among them were Michael Sterling, the most vilified tech billionaire of his era; Mazier Enfield, a celebrity known more for his followers than his achievements; and Bishop Robert Ralston, a revered spiritual leader.

They land on Trappist-1E more than 2,100 years before the colony ship is due, under-equipped and unprepared. With no blueprint and no backup, survival comes down to instinct, ethics and will, until a catastrophe upends their fragile order.

One assassination. Missing heirs. Four powers a step from war.

The murder of a royal governor and the disappearance of his heirs push the Thean Supremacy, the Empire, the DeLion Confederacy and the Guild toward open war. Each has its own secrets and ancient legacies.

Pilot Justine Marta and her family are recruited by the Guild for a high-stakes rescue. Along the way they uncover whispers of the legendary Star Guard and the “planet eaters” that once threatened civilization, and they have to stop that threat before it consumes everything.