The Iron Tide

Mars Colony Seven has not seen a blue sky in nine months. The atmospheric processors on the eastern face of the Lower Warren wheeze their last as their intake stacks are sealed and replaced by the angular throats of fuel condensation arrays, repurposed for a war the colonists never voted for. Adjudicator Pell arrives with sealed conscription orders and a single, cold choice: board the fleet pushing for the Belt, or stay on a dying world with no air to trade. Sable Renn, a maintenance tech who has nothing left to fix, is swept into the draft alongside engineer Kael Voss, field medic Mara Koss, the restless Davan, navigation prodigy Yuki Tanaka, and the rest of the Warren-born rabble nobody expected to survive contact. Their convoy is bound for the Belt, where a coalition of corporate interests and off-world fleets is gathering an Iron Tide of warships, and human cargo, to claim what the inner system cannot provide. But the fleet carries its own fractures. Orin Dray, a career officer with a private agenda, sees the conscripts as nothing more than fuel for his command. Osei, a defected corp-engineer with secrets sewn into her implants, knows the Iron Tide's true destination is a lie. And in the holding decks, a child named Ryn listens to the hull creak and counts the minutes until the air turns wrong again. When the convoy reaches the edge of charted space and finds the enemy already waiting, every colonist drafted from the rust must decide what they are willing to burn, loyalties, oaths, each other, to see the other side of the dark. The Iron Tide does not turn back. Neither can they.