Hell Fleet

About this book

The Triple Alliance is at war. The enemy — an amphibious xeno power from beyond the Frontier stars — has a super-weapon that jams quantum comms and degrades fleet navigation across an entire theatre. Commander Adella Vega is working an anti-smuggling beat in a system of decommissioned naval hulks, exiled there for reasons she's still trying to live with. The wider war is coming for her, and one of her gunners is not who he claims to be.

A partial pivot toward military SF. The POV anchor is Adella Vega, a naval officer carrying unresolved grief about her husband Eskandar — whose civilian liner was weaponised in a 20,000-death incident — and a tolerated-but-not-trusted reputation among her superiors.

The war is real. The Quazalrats — Quazzies, in fleet slang — are amphibious, biologically explosive in reproduction, and culturally distinctive enough to make conventional diplomacy useless. Their super-weapon doubles as a sensor: they read targets through the jamming field they themselves produce. Combined Fleet doctrine — long-range coordinated fire with quantum command-and-control — is essentially negated.

In the middle of all this, on the gunnery roster, is a man calling himself Kal Blackstar. He's the master gunner for the Heezy super-weapons that Fleet has been quietly fielding, and he doesn't remember much from before he joined up. In the late chapters, the Gravity Rose arrives in-theatre under a false flag, on a rescue mission.