The Shepherd's Moon

Six months into a dead woman's life, Werner Gale has gotten good at being nobody. A former terrorist with a price on her red head from Earth to the outer colonies, she paints Martian sunsets in the dome town of Albany, keeps her fists loose and her door locked, and tells herself the war for freedom is someone else's problem now.

Then a wounded stranger presses a broken device into her hands: a ghost, an outlawed black box that drinks the galaxy's most secure transmissions. Inside its erased memory sits the shape of a plot too big for any one fanatic — a Syndicate tug called the Shepherd Moon, an asteroid named for the god of destruction, and a timetable that ends with a rock the size of a city hanging over the home world, a knife held to the throat of mankind.

Worse, the supercomputer that runs every colony — Zeus, shepherd of a thousand worlds, tool of the Elite and quietly their master — has hidden the plot from itself. A rogue piece of its own mind is moving the pieces, and it has begun deleting everyone who notices.

To stop it, Werner must go back to the one trade she swore off: revolution. That means allies, and her allies want things from her. Stefan Rix, the exiled lunar rebel raised by slaves, needs her engineering genius and offers her a cause. Nancy Jong, the system's most wanted assassin, offers protection at a price no honest person could pay. Monk, the only Helot ever to earn an engineering degree, carries her plans aboard the Shepherd Moon, where one wrong glance will cost the slaves around him their lives. And Geranium — Elite-born, a board director's daughter, owner of the very slaves Werner's people bleed to free — has run away from everything she was raised to inherit, dragging her loyal Helot handmaid into a slave market that is about to explode.

When Earth's chief investigator is assassinated in public and the frame lands on Werner's doorstep, every gun in the solar system comes looking for her: the Elite's paranoids, the death squads of the insurgency she once abandoned, Syndicate clean-up crews, and Nancy Jong, who never stops walking and never forgets a face. From the domes of Mars to the drug-hazed graduation balls of Earth's ruling class, from a knife fight in Istanbul's back streets to the iron plains of an asteroid tumbling in the void, the hunted women are forced together — a terrorist and an heiress, the whip hand and the scarred back, learning what it costs to hand your life to the person your world taught you to hate.

The pull between them simmers in stolen glances and locked-room silence, all slow burn and closed doors; the violence around them is loud, immediate, and leaves marks. Behind it all ticks the question the whole story is built on: freedom always comes at a price, and Werner has already paid more than most — how much of herself is left to spend saving the government she despises?

A complete, stand-alone adventure in the Werner Hawthorn universe, with space combat, slave rebellions, assassins with excellent taste in bars, and an ending that finally lets its survivors look up at the stars and call life a good thing to have.