A.K. DUBOFF

Powerful players scheming from the shadows. An ancient alien starship. Who can be trusted with the most coveted technology in the Commonwealth?

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Evan and Anya flee Aethos with a target on their backs. Unfortunately, the ship’s sentient AI is missing thousands of years of history and is just as surprised to be on the run.

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As they search for the ship’s makers, Evan and Anya soon discover that the interstellar plot to transform the Commonwealth with alien tech runs much deeper than they’d ever imagined.

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With two factions squaring off on Aethos, they must pick a side. In the face of powerful adversaries, Evan and Anya will need to use all their skills and contacts to decide who they can trust with the ancient ship’s powerful technology.

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Can they keep the ship from falling into the wrong hands?

PLOT SYNOPSIS - Lost Planet (Starship of the Ancients Book 2)

Upon boarding the newly discovered alien starship Asamar in a cavern on Aethos, Evan and Anya are greeted by a sentient AI, Sam, who has been dormant for over six thousand years. Eager to find out what happened to his makers—the Korani—Sam takes Evan and Anya on the ship to his homeworld, Koranis. However, they discover the capital city and all other signs of the Korani have been destroyed, including ‘glassed’ sites from what appears to be weapons fire. The planet is now barren and abandoned, but they determine that at least some of the inhabitants had safely evacuated, though their ultimate fate remains unknown.

On Aethos, Roman Santano—now fully merged with the alien sphere—explores new powerful telepathic and regenerative abilities. Roman uses his new abilities like a tracker on Conroy’s guard, Samor, allowing him to locate Conroy’s hideouts. Chancellor Conroy and his people have been forced into hiding in jungle caves, struggling to survive with severely limited supplies.

Continuing their investigation into the Korani mystery, Sam takes Evan and Anya to another Korani planet to look for clues. Discovering a large ‘grown’ stone structure and alien technology, they nickname the planet Temple World. Evan finds a star map, which directs them to other potential Korani worlds, and also locates a collection of the Korani nanites, which he harnesses as two bracelets: one for commanding the alien nanites and another with nanites he can deploy for tasks or to attack.

Evan and Anya build a friendship with Sam, and the AI reveals the ability to transform matter—retrofitting the Asamar’s interior to better suit the human passengers, manufacturing food for them, and also creating a shuttle that can pass as a human vessel though it is equipped with a jump drive and stealth tech.

Using this new shuttle for reconnaissance, they travel to Pavia, a planet noted on the star map that Evan also suspects is a Syndicate outpost. They confirm the existence of a massive Syndicate operation, which is clearly collaborating with the Commonwealth government. All signs point to the planet being the production source for the Syndicate’s mysterious serum that functions as a ‘primer’ for interfacing with the alien tech.

Still unsure about whether to trust Conroy and even more suspicious about Rostov, Anya makes a risky but untraceable call to her father, political consultant Julian Rojas, with the hope of gaining clarity on the broader conspiracy. Through his evasive and detached responses, Anya painfully deduces that her father was likely complicit in the colony ship’s destruction.

With nowhere else to turn, Evan reaches out to his former black market contact, Zaris Alva, a smuggler opposed to the Syndicate. Evan knew Zaris during his time undercover, and they had a flirtatious relationship; Evan makes it clear he is now fully committed to Anya, to Zaris’ disappointment. The initial meeting where Evan proposes an alliance goes poorly, but Zaris decides to independently seize the Pavia gate using a decoy fleet as she seeks revenge on the Syndicate for years of bad dealings.

With the gate secure and Zaris having confirmed Evan’s outlandish story, Evan and Anya join a ground invasion of the Pavia facility. During the operation, Marta Santano, Roman’s sister and a major Syndicate leader, captures Anya. In the attempt to free Anya, Evan inadvertently triggers latent Korani tech deep in the underground facility, prompting a collapse of the complex. During their escape, they discover a massive mine of unique rocks with Korani traces. Evan is also ‘Touched’ by an alien presence, which appears to grant him new, enhanced abilities from ‘primal energies’.

The team escapes, but the facility is buried and Zaris is injured. Sam observes another strange signal on the world, which is similar to others observed on the star map planets as well as on Terrax, the Commonwealth’s capital planet. During an altercation in space after escaping the planet, some of the Asamar’s jump drive nanites are broken off and taken by Marta before she flees, with hopes of reverse engineering the alien tech.

Back on Aethos, the standoff between Conroy’s people and the invaders intensifies. Roman’s team uses explosives to collapse the Echo Falls cave hideout, which is also housing the colony ship crash survivors. When they discover that Conroy wasn’t there, Roman then attempts to kill Conroy at the Hidden Grotto location, but he’s thwarted by Samor.

Wanting leverage to force Conroy from hiding, Roman tricks the crash survivors into thinking they are being moved to better lodging, intending to use them as hostages in Conroy’s original bunker. Conroy, meanwhile, plots to retake his bunker using an aerosolized poison derived from a local vine, which would kill Roman and his collaborators—not realizing that the crash survivors have been moved there, too.

Following the Pavia raid, Zaris agrees to join Evan and Anya in their larger fight against the Syndicate and Rostov. Sam modifies the Asamar’s jump drive assembly so it can expand to accommodate multiple ships.

After returning to Aethos with the Asamar and six of Zaris’ ships, Evan confronts Roman. Using his new ‘primal energies’ powers, he forces the merged Korani consciousness out of Roman. In the aftermath of the fight, Sam delivers a groundbreaking revelation: the Korani settlers did not die, but transformed and became one with the planet Aethos itself, integrating their consciousness with the world through nanotechnology. The alien spheres are individual Korani consciousnesses, and the one with Roman was an ‘imprisoned’ mind forced out of the collective because of its sinister nature.

Now captive and powerless, Roman warns Conroy about the civilians in the bunker, stopping the release of the aerosolized poison before anyone is harmed. Evan debates killing Roman but decides that he has important information, making him more valuable to keep alive.

With the invaders on Aethos now in custody, Evan brokers an unprecedented alliance between Zaris’ forces and Chancellor Conroy’s resistance, setting the stage for a full-scale rebellion against Chancellor Rostov and the Syndicate.