Eschaton

Charles Stross

In a future where humanity has achieved unimaginable technological advancement thanks to the sentient AI known as the Eschaton, a strict prohibition on time travel is enforced with deadly precision. On the distant worlds of the New Republic, descendants of this advanced Earth live in a simpler existence, unaware of the cosmic dangers lurking. Their fragile peace is shattered by the arrival of the Festival, an alien information plague that rains forbidden technologies from the sky, igniting revolutionary fervor and threatening to draw the Eschaton's wrath. As a battle fleet mobilizes to combat this existential threat, a spaceship engineer and a diplomat are tasked with a clandestine mission: to avert galactic war by any means necessary, even if it means sabotaging their own forces.