The thrilling third installment in New York Times bestselling author Ian Douglas’s Galaxy Raiders series, in which Admiral Morrigan and her fleet must journey to the heart of enemy territory to convince their AI attackers that humanity deserves a place in the galaxy.

Admiral Alexandra Morrigan has led Earth’s fleet across eighteen thousand light years of hostile space, past alien civilizations who have become allies or enemies, through the rubble of battles that redrew the Galaxy’s maps—and now she stands at the edge of everything. Baade’s Window yawns before her like a door into the heart of creation, and beyond it waits the Galactic Core: a seething cathedral of a billion suns, ruled by amortal machine intelligences known as the Galactic Authority—who have decided that humanity must die.

There is no negotiating with the Authority—no appealing to the empathy of beings who do not feel emotion. Yet all-out war against a civilization whose technology and weaponry outstrips human invention by millennia would be a suicide mission. The only hope for Morrigan’s task force is to find a yet-undiscovered weakness in the godlike AI overlords, and to do that, the allied human-alien fleet will have to bring the conflict to the Authority’s doorstep.

As Morrigan drives her fleet through the Core’s killing radiation toward Sagittarius A Star itself, she discovers that the enemy she came to fight is fracturing—ancient factions awakening from billion-year slumbers, machine gods going to war with each other over whether a species of clever animals from a wounded blue planet deserves to exist. And somewhere beyond the rim of the Galaxy, something older and stranger than the Authority watches, and waits… and hungers.