In 2041, the sun will pass through a river of stellar gas — igniting an extinction-scale micro-nova.
A catastrophe cycle, documented by geologists in the 1950s — but never calendared until aliens from another planet appear at the Dust Cloud Spiral with an electrostatic vacuum cleaner.
It is not the invasion from outer space everyone imagined. The gods of Egypt were adventure tourists. Atlantis was a vibe, not a place. Jivada is anchored in Earth’s past, invested in its future.
If humanity had been a reliable business partner, the AjJivadi would not have withdrawn into the shadows, soon to be forgotten. Cosmic housekeeping is technologically proprietary. Our would-be patrons will not share science with a neighbor they cannot trust.
U.S. President Carmen Benequista is front row center — head of state, mother, widow, war veteran. No stranger to reliance upon the mercy of God.
But the spirit of sacrifice is not an article of surrender.
It is a doctrine of self-rule.
Maroli Tango is a first-contact story in which the aliens have been here all along, a political thriller in which the sharpest weapon is a supply chain, and a love story about a Catholic president—fourteen years widowed, a woman who has spent her whole life belonging to everyone but herself—being asked, at the worst possible moment, to want something of her own.
It is also the final book of the AjJivadi trilogy—Sanskrit for “Clan of the Life-Giver”—and the capstone of a secret history spanning seventy thousand years, carried forward by lemur folk, ape folk, and biotech labor appliances possessed by spirits of the dead, although not in a bad way.
This volume stands on its own, but new readers may prefer to begin two books back with Elbert.
If you like your science fiction morally serious, quietly funny, and told in chapters short enough to finish one more before bed—welcome.
Literary space opera. Political suspense. Romantic tension. And the discovery that who you’re with is more important than what you do.
John Dyer Writes 
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