By Aaron Brownell
Deep Space Salvage Like No Other!
2024 London Book Festival Science Fiction Award Winner
Perfect for fans of Dark Matter, Firefly, and spunky crews caught in corporate crosshairs while doing their darndest to survive, The Black Map will take you on an epic new science fiction adventure!
On the outer edge of the galaxy, some salvage jobs are easy and some you don’t come back from. Working for the mob can be like that. For Booker Ward and the crew of the salvage ship Kristi, this new job they’ve just been handed will end up being more than they bargained for…
The crew’s employer has found what they think is a Centurion class battleship from the fall of the Realm. Something not seen in the galaxy for centuries and abandoned on a planet at the galactic edge—out on the edge of the black. The only images available are vague and grainy deep space scans. It’s impossible to tell if the ship is even in one piece. Booker wants to pass. His boss doesn’t care. The mob wants the warship, so it’s Booker’s job to go get it.
Bad jobs come with problems, and this one’s no different. The first problem with the job is that their prize is huge. Their salvage ship can’t refloat anything of the battleship’s size without using the battleship’s own internal power. But re-firing the engines—if they can be re-fired—means waking up the ship’s Artificial Intelligence.
Next problem; if the ship doesn’t want to go with them then they’ll also have to deal with a hostile warship. Bringing it back to life after so many centuries could end up being their undoing.
Their problems don’t stop with a potentially moody ship they might not be able to move. If it really is a lost battleship from the Realm, every local government, militia and pirate gang in the galaxy is going to want a piece of it. The Kristi’s salvage crew needs to get out there, find this ship, and do whatever they’re going to do before the danger they’ve hooked themselves to drags them down.