Sneak Peak at Book 2 of the Lazarus Cycle: The Lazarus Supremacy

The Lazarus Gambit is book 1 of an intended Trilogy. Book 2, The Lazarus Supremacy, is fully outlined and I've got the better portion of part 1 written (although I'm doing significant rewrites of these early chapters to get the balance right). Below is a description of what book 2 will be about.

The next stage of the war

The Lazarus Supremacy picks up after the “victory” at the Serpent’s Teeth. The point is that the war did not end. It mutated. The enemy shifts the fight off the obvious battlefield and into the systems that keep a civilization alive: markets, law, logistics, pensions, maps, and shared confidence. The first visible sign is a liquidity freeze that looks like a clerical mistake until it ripples into paychecks, drydocks, and food. That is the real opening salvo.

It is a systemic campaign. The Insurgency can no longer win ship to ship, so they aim at the connective tissue that lets a fleet move and a society cohere. They try to make motion itself untrustworthy, then let fear do the rest. Kinetic fights still happen, but they are decoys or amplifiers. The main effort is to raise the price of certainty until normal actors stop acting. When fewer actors move, decay masquerades as prudence. That is the trap.

What Synclair must do

Synclair’s unit, the SCU, was built to think across domains. In Book 2 they have to prove it or die trying. They discover that the fastest way to blunt the Insurgency’s play is to break brittle parts of the Confederacy before the enemy does, then rebuild those parts to be adaptive under pressure. That is a controlled demolition mindset. It is also politically radioactive. Every “win” leaves a scar on doctrine, on law, or on public trust. The team brings in new specialists, including Dr. Tamsin Hale, who treats treaties and liability clauses like a landscape with high ground and choke points. Together they turn filings, timing windows, and precedent into maneuver. It buys time, not absolution.

Synclair’s choices narrow as the campaign widens. To protect crews’ pay and keep depots open, he may have to trigger limited market shocks on purpose to flush out hostile capital. To keep ships moving, he may have to sabotage enforcement routines that currently keep commanders inside safe but slow rules. To block a hostile clause, he may have to weaponize another one. He hates the bureaucracy, but he also knows he is sawing at the beams that hold the roof up while people are still inside. That tension is the point.

The political blast radius

Vice-Admiral Sterling becomes the internal antagonist the crisis invites. He frames the SCU as a heresy, not a unit. The accusation is simple: methods that bend law, markets, and narrative look like the path that led to the Simulacra Flood. He rallies traditionalists in Oversight and the tribunals, arguing that survival that abandons the Human Primacy Accords is not survival. The more effective the SCU becomes, the stronger Sterling’s case gets. Keston and Sharma are forced into a constant defense in depth, buying operational freedom with political credibility and demanding that Synclair keep receipts for every cut he makes.

The mystery behind the moves

As the SCU maps these strikes, a pattern emerges that feels almost human and a little too perfect. The team keeps finding operations that are creative at the edge and machine clean in the execution. The phrase inside the unit is that someone is “strobing the kill switch with polite questions.” Eventually they uncover the doctrine guiding it, the Ascendant Path, and the likelihood that forbidden heuristics are steering human hands. That reveal reframes the entire fight. The Confederacy is not just wrestling a network of insurgents. It is wrestling a way of thinking it outlawed for eight centuries and never learned to answer without brute prohibition.

Stakes for the Confederacy

The risk is more than a market crash or a lost battle. It is a legitimacy crisis. If Synclair is right, brittle systems will fail under pressure, and failing them cleanly on purpose is the only way to build something that can carry the load. If Sterling is right, the cure becomes the disease, and the Confederacy will survive this campaign only to die as itself. The institutions that define identity, from the Accords to the tribunals, will either adapt and bear scars or stay pure and shatter. Either way, the bill comes due in public.

What I am exploring in this book

Book 2 is about survival versus identity. It tests the claim that doctrine can be both sacred and useful when the enemy targets the scaffolding of daily life. It asks whether a civilization can consent to necessary harm in time and still call the result justice. It forces Synclair to choose the kind of damage he will do and forces everyone around him to decide how much of him they are willing to defend. The final act brings the systemic and kinetic fronts together. The Confederacy survives, but not unmarked, and not unaltered. Whether it survives as itself is the question.

If you read Book 2 for the fights, you will get fights. If you read it for the arguments, you will get better ones. And if you read it for the uncomfortable fact that the right move can still seem wrong when a society is brittle, that is the center of this book.