Games

Before Jack ever set eyes on the courier, someone else came looking for it. You are Gilbert, a resistance operative smuggled onto a GigaSource mining asteroid with two objectives: sabotage the mine badly enough to cause a real diversion, and find the old courier vessel said to be lying somewhere out on the asteroid's surface.

Explore the colony, scavenge what you can, choose your targets and plan a way outside. The guards are everywhere, the resistance is counting on you, and the odds are stacked against you. Readers of Stolen Freedom will know exactly how high the stakes are.

Jack has spent his whole life in the tunnels of a GigaSource mining colony, where the workers are counted like equipment and the guards never stop watching. Now he has found something out on the asteroid's surface that nobody is supposed to know about: a damaged courier ship, and a voice inside it asking for his help.

Guide Jack through the colony one level at a time. Slip past patrols and sensors, pull on a VoidSuit to cross the airless surface, swing across the gaps with a VoidHook, and smuggle out the parts the courier needs to fly again. Stay out of sight, keep an eye on your suit power — and don't fall.

Someone out there is making the megacorporations nervous, and they have started calling him the Jackrabbit. Halberd Recovery Services has a client who wants him found — and a contract, a datapad and a travel itinerary with your name on them.

The brief is thin: believed male, known links with Horizon Outpost. Travel out by shuttle and liner, then work Horizon's bars, shops, shipyards and back corridors for anyone who knows more than they're letting on. The fee is substantial. The client values discretion. And what happens after the finding is not your department.

Since accepting his loss, Jack has searched for information about who his parents were before the mine, and found nothing in the public records but polite dead ends. Aggie means to look where he never could: inside the closed systems the megacorporations keep for themselves.

Steer Aggie through the networks of five corporations — GigaSource, CosmoFreight, CyberNexus, QuantumGrid and AetherLink — slipping from node to node before her trace fades, dodging security bots and collapsing connections, and recovering whatever fragments of the truth she can find. These systems were built to keep the likes of her out. She is very difficult to see.