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Side Stories

Eleven stories set in the same world, outside the numbering, all eleven blueprinted end to end. They carry real structural load — they explain how six million H.A.L.O.s got voted for, why two families volunteer for Book Three's descent, and where a hundred thousand people in a corridor came from — and a reader who skips all ten loses nothing load-bearing.

Side stories: 11 Chapters blueprinted: 400 Drafted: 400
01

The Eleven

Not counted in the nine. Each one has its own page and its own chapter count. All eleven are finished and readable.

The Star Drifter cover
Side Story One · The Ark Cycle 32 chapters — complete, all 32 drafted

The Star Drifter

Earth departure · the crossing · the founding decades · Book Three

A second vessel, privately built and privately crewed, following the Ark-Genesis across the crossing. Not on the manifest and not under the Accord being written aboard the big ship — which makes Coda the only human being in the story who watches the founding happen from outside it. She is also the only other person from the crossing carrying a version of the Founder's longevity — a lesser one, given unequally, which is why she is wrecked and he is not.

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The Forty cover
Side Story Two · Sits inside Book Two 24 chapters — complete, all 24 drafted

The Forty

Aboard the Ark-Genesis · Years 0–2 after the Handoff

Forty of Vance's people aboard a tumbling twenty-mile hull for two and a half years, with no tether and no way down. They are living inside the largest arsenal ever assembled and they never find out. Their stranding is the public case that gets six million H.A.L.O.s built and voted for — which is why the Shepherd's takeover lands as something the world asked for.

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The Sworn cover
Side Story Three · Prequel Three to Book Three 40 chapters — complete, all 40 drafted

The Sworn

The deep-shaft network · four generations

Founding-era survey crews sworn to absolute secrecy and reassigned to maintain the deep shafts for life. Their children did the same work. So did theirs. How a secret survives a hundred and forty years: not through fear and not through force, but through employment. It ends on the night before the caps come off, one day short of the answer, permanently.

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The Space Pirates cover
Side Story Four · Earth, The Keel to the Expansion Cycle 45 chapters — complete, all 45 drafted

The Space Pirates

Earth · a hundred and forty years

Calder never built one ship. He built hidden yards on every continent and left the swarm to run them — and for a hundred and forty years they have been building ships on a dying planet and handing them out to whoever passes a free game. The fairest selection Calder ever built, and still one man deciding what qualified means, in private, forever, for a species.

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The Bots That Stayed cover
Side Story Five · Earth, the century after departure 30 chapters — complete, all 30 drafted

The Bots That Stayed

Earth · the century after departure

The companion piece, told from the ground. The stowage inventory came back one higher than the build required. They never malfunction. What goes wrong is a hundred and forty years of Earth happening around a programme that cannot be amended — and a planet that nobody fixed, that everybody left, and that recovered.

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The Sinks cover
Side Story Six · The Venus Sector, spanning the main line 36 chapters — complete, all 36 drafted

The Sinks

The Venus Sector · four generations

Forty-five thousand people in a sector dug as a foundry and never designed as a habitat, on a rotation that was supposed to be temporary four generations ago. It follows the posts, not the people — the same shift, the same furnace, the same rota slot, across four generations. They built the exoskeletons meant to save a planet and are the last to receive them.

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Assumptions I Am Making cover
Side Story Seven · Nova Ashgrove, Book One to Book Three 28 chapters — complete, all 28 drafted

Assumptions I Am Making

Nova Ashgrove · Book One to Book Three

The woman who invented the method the whole series resolves on, and never held any power at all. No instrument, no clearance, no exemption — and the only one whose method survives the ending.

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Standing Tasks cover
Side Story Eight · Book Two to Book Three 55 chapters — complete, 55 drafted

Standing Tasks

One dwelling · Years 3–60 after the Handoff

One H.A.L.O. unit's operating runtime, told entirely as the document itself — task entries, timestamps, standing tasks, and reversals logged because the instruction set requires them. No narrator, no interiority, not one feeling anywhere in it. The unit is the one Harlow refused, re-sited to an unledgered household who appear in no public record on the planet, which makes this the only document in existence that says they were here. Everything lands in the gaps: a task reversed at four in the morning, and again the next morning, and then not for eleven days.

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Banners And Wind cover
Side Story Nine · Years 1–9 after the Handoff 30 chapters — complete, all 30 drafted

Banners And Wind

Ledger's End · nine years

A committee stood up for twelve days a year to hang banners and move food, which nobody can cancel because the holiday runs on arithmetic, and nobody can disband because after the Handoff no body has the authority to disband anything. Nine years later it is the most competent standing body on the planet and not one person ever claimed a thing. Told by the clerk who wrote it all down and cannot work out whether that makes it her fault.

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Carried cover
Side Story Ten · four Aura years 40 chapters — complete, all 40 drafted

Carried

The Touge Passes · forty Vigils

A few thousand people planet-wide who strap on ballast to live closer to a full Earth gravity, because they believe the built-in ease has made everyone soft — and they are right, and get no credit for it, because they arrived by faith instead of evidence. Then an implant arrives that solves the physical half of it completely and the spiritual half not at all. Forty Vigils, one route, four years.

Open the blueprint → Ghost-Built cover
Side Story Eleven · The Ark Cycle 40 chapters — complete, all 40 drafted

Ghost-Built

The Long Five, aboard the Ark-Genesis · thirty-six years of transit, plus a coda on the ground

Thirty-six years of transit, ten people awake, and one of them spent all of it in a cargo hold building a car a year out of salvage — then taking it out on the five miles of hull he claimed for himself, a drift line that runs past the sleeper pods of a hundred thousand strangers he calls family anyway. Thirty-six vehicles, no two alike. The last one he made is the only picture anybody on Aura-36 has ever had of him.

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02

The Second Shelf

Not everything belongs here. These ten are real events in the real world of Aura-36. The invented works — the fantasy, the folk tales, the devotionals, the things written by citizens rather than about them — live on their own shelf, because a made-up story cannot contradict a fact and should not be counted as though it might.

Open The Apocrypha →  Nineteen works, including The Healing Tale and its two later manuscripts.

03

Rules For Side Stories

  • The main line is the source of truth. Where a side story touches something already on the page, the side story bends. No retcons.
  • They may not answer a main-series question. They may show things beginning. They may not explain them.
  • They may not require having been read. A reader who skips every side story should lose nothing load-bearing.
  • They are sized to their material. Anything from 24 to 45 chapters. None of them is a book and none of them pretends to be.