Marooned with the Enemy Ace

Every salvage captain in the dark knows the first rule of Dessa Sarto's ledger: nothing rides free. Not air. Not fuel. Not mercy. Her barge, the Magpie, is nine years of secondhand parts and hard arithmetic, and Dessa keeps it alive the only way she knows, by pricing everything before she spends it.

Then she hears a mayday no chart can explain, and cuts a burning fighter out of a wreck field at the nebula's edge that official maps insist is empty.

The fighter is brand new, unregistered, and built on a production line that was struck from the rolls before the war began. Its pilot is Casimir Danek: Dominion ace, sixty-one confirmed kills, the man whose wing cut her brother's squadron out of the sky six years ago. His fighter is dying, her barge is the only home for forty light-years, and the rescue bill has already come due, because saving him costs her a winter's worth of air, a lifetime of suppressant charges, and every margin she has ever kept.

She should space him. Instead she puts him on watch, hands him a checklist, and starts an argument that will not end for sixty days.

Because the wreck field is no accident of war. It is the Boneyard, a grave sixty years deep, where an entire fleet was scuttled and sold, and the rules of the dead are stranger than the rules of any government. Because a Compact cruiser comes hunting a single salvage barge with warrants signed before the peace they cite even existed. Because every hunter in the dark, from a merciless Rectification major to a gray-gloved collector who pays triple for silence, is converging on her tired old hull, and they all want the same thing: the ace, the records he carries, and the grave kept quiet.

Then the ceasefire is announced, ending a thirty-year war in a single noon, and the hunters do not go home. That is when Dessa understands the truth nobody will publish: the peace itself is the crime scene. Somebody sold the corridor, bought the armistice, and filed the paperwork before the choirs finished rehearsing, and the only witnesses left alive are a salvage engineer with a ledger, an enemy pilot with a tally book, and a graveyard full of machines that remember everything.

Her talent is turning dead wrecks into live answers, and it has a price she pays in front of the reader: every miracle costs the Magpie an irreplaceable part. Her ship is her health bar, and the war is spending it down to the last bolt.

From wary bedfellows to back-to-back gunners, from a gun held on a stranger in a flooded hangar to a two-name charter signed in a lighthouse, this is the story of the woman who salvaged the truth and the pilot who finally found a war worth flying. He kept a list of everyone he killed. She keeps books that balance. Together they are about to audit the end of the war, and the dark will hear every line of it read aloud.