Tor.Com is offering a free download of John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire. The book was the winner of the 2018 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and a 2018 Hugo Award finalist.
From the publisher’s website:
Riding The Flow, the only way to travel faster-than-light, humanity spreads to innumerable other worlds. Earth is forgotten. A new empire arises, the Interdependency, based on the doctrine that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war—and, for the empire’s rulers, a system of control.
The Flow is eternal—but it’s not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well. In rare cases, entire worlds have been cut off from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that the entire Flow is moving, possibly separating all human worlds from one another forever, three individuals—a scientist, a starship captain, and the emperox of the Interdependency—must race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.