The Dyson Swarm's Last Lightkeepers
A Space Opera Novella

About this book:

In the rusting skeleton of a once-glorious Dyson Swarm, the light is dying—and Captain Vane's crew are the only ones bothering to change the bulbs. When a entire sector goes dark, forty thousand souls freeze in the shadow of a stolen star, and the *Aethelgard* finds a matte-gray siphon ship bleeding the grid dry. Corporate abandoned this neighborhood years ago; now someone's carving it up for parts.

Vane, Silas, and Mara aren't heroes. They're lightkeepers—blue-collar spacers armed with pneumatic wrenches, jury-rigged EVA suits, and a ship held together by spite and baling wire. But when they cut the chains locking a habitat's population inside their own coffin, they uncover a conspiracy that reaches from the scorched mirrors of Segment Seven to the boardrooms that wrote off the Swarm as a tax loss. The power thieves have military-grade gear and a clean getaway vector. The *Aethelgard* has a single industrial laser, a mirror array they just weaponized, and five more warning lights blinking before shift end.

Out here, electricity isn't a utility—it's the only thing between you and the void. And the grid has just declared war on the people keeping it alive.