Anyone Else's Future

Vincent Chen fixes things on The Rock, a hundred-year-old mining station near the edge of human space. He’s good at it and he likes the work. When his mentor’s old friend docks a dying ship on his station, it kicks off a journey to save fourteen million people living around a star that is being murdered, with five months on the clock.

Within weeks he’s kidnapped by pirates and folded into a crew of mercenaries, scholars, and one expensive bird. He finds himself caught between his own moral convictions and a crew that does whatever it takes to save the star. All while they are hunted across the galaxy.

Vince hopes fixing a dying star won’t be too different from fixing a busted air scrubber. As it turns out, it’s not. His coworkers are a lot more heavily armed and getting spare parts requires robbing a museum, but he can work with that.