Ciro and the Space Miners: The Race for the Chain

He won the asteroid. Then he made the mistake of reading who gave it to him. In 2387, the asteroid belt is the engine of the human solar system: the metal and water that built Mars and feed every colony come up out of the rock — and the rock is governed by the races. Win, and you take the mining rights for a corporation, an alliance, a government — rights that arrive as a chain: a record of permissions, signed and countersigned, reaching back to whoever holds the authority. Ciro is the finest young pilot on the circuit, and the last man who should start asking questions. But the claim he wins was never meant to exist, and the chain behind it does the one thing a chain must never do: it reaches back two hundred years to a principal no one can name — the same impossible permission his father followed to the inner edge of the belt, ten years ago, and never came home from. A thousand kilometers away, an auditor begins reading the same anomaly from the other end. Between them, the quiet machinery that has governed human space for generations begins, at last, to turn — toward the single question it was built to absorb: who, at the bottom of it all, is actually in charge? Every claim, every prize, every command in the solar system runs on a chain of permissions — and the most dangerous thing a person can do is read one all the way to the end. Ciro is about to learn why his father never came back from the same question. Civilizational, philosophical science fiction — the stored consent of the dead. Book One of The Ciro Universe.