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Generic location illustration for Earth
location

Earth

The Earth system

The ruined homeworld, now embargoed, crash-littered and about to become the ground of a war fought from orbit.

Story so far

Earth ends the book as a contested prize rather than a corpse. The Homecoming Queen hangs in orbit above it, secretly the strongest ship there, while Syndicate security corvettes patrol without realizing what they are sharing the sky with. Below, a The Dream cruiser has crash-landed on the surface over the continent of Australia, and a number of other ships have come down with it.

An embargo has sealed the main tunnel access route into the Earth system, stopping all traffic through the gate and ruining waystations like Squirties just outside it - York notes the resistance cannot leave yet either. And Earth is where phase two begins: Colonel Boomer orders four Cronus-class Power Armor suits set aside for a landing skiff to reinforce a pregnant veteran on the surface, and then declares it is time to bring the war out of the dungeon.

Appearance

A world seen from orbit, ringed by warships and transports, its surface scattered with fresh crash sites.

Role

The embargoed, occupied homeworld where the resistance's open war is about to be fought.

Relationships

Homecoming Queen — Orbits above it, armed and undetected
Colonel Boomer — Sends a landing skiff to its surface
The Dream — One of their cruisers crashed onto it over Australia
Squirties — A waystation just outside its tunnel access route

Earlier in this series

Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings:

Sources — 10 recorded facts, by chapter
Chapter 2
  • One of the pre-seeded worlds, switched on and turned into a dungeon so its dead could be shipped away.
Chapter 12
  • The dungeon's host world, where the naga crown princess is the highest-ranking royal actually present.
Chapter 26
  • Humanity's ruined homeworld, marked on the interface map as the AI's primary zone of influence by a growing red dot.
Chapter 33
  • The crawlers' home world, invoked by Prepotente as a taxonomic reference point for Milk's race.
Chapter 42
  • Humanity's home world, whose millions of surviving surface citizens are the bargaining chip of the parlay.
Chapter 68
  • Humanity's shattered homeworld, now legally headed by Carl and coveted as a post-crawl settlement prize.
Chapter 83
  • The lost home world Carl invokes as the bond between himself, Donut, and Ferdinand.
Chapter 85
  • Its surface still holds roughly 120,000 children's bodies in a kinder facility, tied to Lucia Mar.
Chapter 95
  • Surface world now taking Dream spacecraft crash-landings as the Dream Syndicate falls apart above it.
Chapter 100
  • The ruined homeworld, now embargoed, crash-littered and about to become the ground of a war fought from orbit.
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