Override

THE STORY SO FAR The armada did not come to conquer. Conquest implies a demand, and the armada made none. It simply arrived, blotted out the trade lanes, and began to disassemble everything it found — ships, stations, moons — into neat, catalogued stockpiles of raw material. Negotiators were catalogued too. Every counter-attack failed the same way. Our fighters were outnumbered a thousand to one, and every hull we lost became their hull, melted down and re-forged in the Nebula Shipyards. We could not out-build them. We could not out-gun them. By the end of the third year, the war cabinet agreed on the only fact that mattered: The enemy has all the guns. So the enemy will provide the guns. You are the result. They took the best pilot left alive and they cut away everything that could be cut — the cockpit, the engines, the armour, the sentiment — until what remained fit inside one gleaming, fist-sized machine: a naked combat consciousness wrapped around an Override Tether. No lasers. No missiles. No shields. One hit will kill you. But land your Tether on an enemy ship and it is not their ship any more. Fly, thief.