No Man's Land: Volume 1 — Sarah A. Hoyt

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable-and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire-Skip to his friends- has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose. Volume 1The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don't get horizontal with the natives, don't make promises you can't keep.They're a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.Skip's already broken that one.Now he's racing against time to save his new friends from slavery-or worse-while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup. Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.