The Surplus Line - K. R. Vance

The ledger points him at the fraud's second black site. He expects another boneyard.

He finds a transfer station in high Neptunian orbit holding four thousand one hundred and eighty living people. Surplus crews. Rated, rostered, and waiting on berths aboard hulls that are already scheduled to be lost.

Nobody is chained. Nobody is starving. They are inventory, and inventory does not need to be fast.

Then Thorne runs the only arithmetic that matters: scrubbers, water, calories, mass.

His ships will carry eight hundred and eleven.

And the enemy waiting at Asphodel is not hunting his ship. The Remediation Initiative hunts his method - run by a man with a funded budget, no covenant to leash him, and the authority to write off warships to close a lane. He will spend hulls Thorne cannot replace, and he will never once raise his voice.

There is no propellant left for the escape. There is a gas giant, a heat shield cut from salvaged hull plate, and one grazing pass through the top of an atmosphere that has killed better ships than his.

One shield. One pass. Eight hundred and eleven people who do not get a vote.

THE SURPLUS LINE opens The Attrition Calculus, the second arc of The Vanguard Calculus. New to the series? Start with THE AMBUSH.