by Mango Taoist
"Command Center, this is Dawn. Nineteen minutes to the Sane. Tell my son that I love him." Those are the last words Earth hears from Dawn Lucius before he leaves his son behind for a wreck in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune. Hard SF. No LitRPG. No status sheets. Physics and logistics constrain the story. The wreck is not a wreck. Dying in the dark, Dawn inherits the office of Star Map Draftsman — a post that can move dark matter itself — and wakes among three federations on the Orion Arm. Immortality is sold as White Crystal. Highways between stars are toll roads. Princes are already at war over both. The oldest civilization in the galaxy needs someone to slow a collision that will wipe the Milky Way. Dawn has one reason to fight his way back: a little boy who introduces himself as Stacean, "made of stars and oceans." When he returns, seventy years have passed. The solar system is a ruin. The question is no longer whether he can get home. It is what is left to come home to. Book 1 of 2. Complete. 25 chapters. Free. Book 2 is Fate of the Galaxy. Also free on the author site: https://mangotaoist.com/books/star-map-draftsman Author's note: “If chapter 1 earned another chapter, follow. If it did not, leave. I prefer a quiet unfollow to a fake five-star.”
