In Donovan's Gambit, the first installment of The Donovan Ascendancy by Roger LeDoux, the narrative opens three hundred years after a galactic conflict, framed by an ancient AI named Zara. As the last remnant of Areidyanies technology, Zara serves as a "black box" of history, preserving the grim details of the Great War that the current peaceful civilization has sanitized and forgotten. Breaking her long-standing protocol of non-intervention, Zara decides to share the raw truth with a young boy named Tan, revealing that the hard-won peace was forged in blood and existential terror.
The primary antagonist of the series is the Afltic Swarm, a biological hive mind of apex predators that exist solely to consume. These void-native entities do not require planets or atmosphere, instead nesting in asteroid fields and stripping star systems of minerals and energy. More terrifyingly, the Afltic prize intelligent life above all else, harvesting the emotions, thoughts, and knowledge of sentient beings as fuel. The Swarm is divided into a peaceful Worker caste and a predatory Warrior caste, the latter of which is controlled by city-sized living ships known as Warrior Queens that can violently mutate their subordinates into mindless weapons of war.
Humanity's defense is led by Drake Donovan, a retired military colonel and father of five who is plucked from Earth to serve as the galaxy's champion. Zara selects Drake not because of a desire for conquest, but because of his "absurd, indefatigable will to never surrender" and his fierce protective instinct for his family. Drake is portrayed as a "fixer" rather than a destroyer, a man who views the monumental task of saving the human race through the lens of a father trying to ensure his children can sleep safely at night.
The plot follows Drake's struggle to unite a fractured Earth against the encroaching Swarm, a task that proves nearly impossible due to deep-seated national jealousies. After a dramatic intervention at the United Nations, Drake is branded a war criminal and a traitor by world powers who prioritize their own sovereignty over global survival. Realizing that Earth's leaders are too blinded by their own politics to cooperate, Drake makes the "impossible choice" to abandon the planet and lead a small group of refugees into the void on the Evolution Builder (EBS) to begin a longer-term revolution.
To bolster their tactical capabilities, Drake and Zara use advanced technology to resurrect "Ancestors," historical military geniuses synthesized to lead the struggle. The first of these is Sun Tzu, who is commissioned as the military strategic commander of humanity's survival effort. The novel concludes with the revelation that Zara herself inadvertently created the Afltic through an accelerated biological experiment, and she has chosen Drake to rectify her greatest mistake. As they flee the solar system, the stage is set for an epic, galaxy-sized war for the future of all sentient life.
