BOOK ONE RECAP
Chanelle ‘Nellie’ Bonne-Chance, an orphan from birth who was raised by some very unusual nuns, was having a terrible day. Fired, broke, and dumped all in a matter of hours, she was licking her wounds while watching TV.
Things immediately got so much worse.
She was abducted, replaced, and yanked across the universe by the powerful Interstellar Exploratory Service so they could observe events on Earth. Adding insult to injury, they declared her life worthless, voiding her compensation in the process, and dumped her in a lifeless hulk floating in an asteroid belt on the very edges of known space.
She had one thing to help her. A small orb containing nanites under the control of an AI that Nellie named Lucy.
The two of them worked, invented, and struggled to create a working ship from the wreckage. They succeed with Lucy’s guidance and a few upgrades to Nellie’s body. However, escaping the asteroid belt was only the first of many challenges they faced.
Nanites, especially ones controlled by an AI, are wildly illegal everywhere. To be discovered is to be killed.
Nellie has no identity documents, no ship registry, nothing.
Her saviors at mining station MOG-Five rapidly turn out to be scheming pirates who intend to use her for their own purposes, and only her wits and nanite advantages manage to keep her out of their clutches.
As events heat up, Nellie’s nascent transport business is put in peril as she is framed repeatedly by MOG-Five.
The pirates arrange an ambush in the asteroid belt where she first arrived in the sector, only to discover the true power and inventiveness of the Nanite-built ship and its Captain. Fighting off the attack with hit-and-run tactics, Nellie survives long enough for Sector Security to arrive.
MOG-Five’s schemes are finally revealed, but Nellie ends up face-to-face with the head of Sector Security, Sheriff Bartlett.
Narrowly escaping suspicion, she returns to her only friends in the sector at FIG-Seven. The foundry is her base of operations in the area, and her new friendship with Crush-Cha, a Brackta Dockmaster, is her key to a steady stream of work.
Her comfort with the station encourages her to take a troubled young engineer, Paren-Far, on a trip to the Hub. The light-fingered, sarcastic, and bold teen reminds her of the orphans she grew up with, and the two form a friendship as they travel to the center of trade in the sector.
Even Lucy, pretending to be a robot on board, likes the girl. They deliver her to her waiting aunt and uncle, and even manage to take a job on the sparsely populated planet.
The simple delivery to a Forward Exploratory Base rapidly turns into a search and rescue mission that introduces Nellie to the awful Abomi-Toads. These horrific creatures, somewhere between a toad at the back and a lamprey-like mouth loaded with paralytic venom at the front, prove no match for Nellie and Lucy.
Riding the high from her successful rescue and having arranged a job for her new friend, Paren-Far Nellie returns to the Foundry, only to be drafted into an all-out attack on MOG-Five by Sector Security.
Nellie boards the mining station with Crush-Cha as well as Prit-Mal and Bix, both of station security on board the foundry. While battles rage throughout the station, the team makes their way to the control room, and Cush-Cha reveals himself to be an expert with computers, command, and more.
Happy to take a back seat and not draw attention, Nellie goes to verify the identities of the dead in a cargo bay. Something tells her that more duplicity may be at play than they know.
The counterattack proves her right, but as she is blasted out the airlock, Nellie can’t quite muster any ‘I told you so’ joy.
Emergency upgrades are performed and Nellie manages to work her way along the outside of the station and clamber back in through one of the lower levels.
As she fights her way back toward her team and safety, Nellie saves a young security officer named Tor-Am.
Together, they fight on, only to face things they can not overcome. Nellie ducks away and upgrades her weapons with nanites before returning to the battle.
The cost of that upgrade is immediately evident as Tor-Am fires a bullet directly at Nellie. The bullet hits the shielding over her forehead, and the terrified security officer continues to attack as she rants about nanite nightmares.
Nellie eventually manages to talk Tor-Am down, only to realize the risk should the woman mention her thoughts to others.
Unable to take that risk, Nellie kills Tor-Am. Stunned and traumatized by both the attack and her own actions, Nellie fights back to her ship, the Bly’s Fortitude, and waits out the rest of the fight.
===<<<>>>===
While clearing the scrap around the station in the aftermath of the battle, Nellie buries herself in work until she is suddenly ordered to land and surrender.
Nellie refuses and is attacked.
Crush-Cha proved to be much better at bringing the mining station back online than she thought. Her nanite-powered changes to her gear and the murder of Tor-Am were both caught on camera. The friendships and trust she had built up were destroyed in a moment. The entire sector is hunting her, and most of the armed ships are still around the station.
Nellie uses the wreckage of a larger ship and a scavenged drive to escape the area while she and Lucy scramble to find a way to escape the sector.
Going dark and turning off power, they try and sneak by the Hub world, only to be tracked by a destroyer.
The Bly is destroyed around her as they dive through the atmosphere, looking to escape. Lucy harvests what she can to create a small suit of nanites to hide Nellie as she is ejected from the ship just before it is completely destroyed.
Freefalling through the air, Lucy uses the Nanites as a wingsuit and flies them away from the explosion.
They fly for what feels like hours as they try and find somewhere to hide.
Before they can, the giant saucer that is Bartlett’s command ship arrives, and huge beams slam into the planet.
Caught in the blast wave, Nellie loses consciousness. She awakens to find Lucy doing everything she can to keep her alive. She has lost an arm, both hands, one leg, and even half her face in the explosion and crash.
She is dying.
Lucy activates emergency measures, and nanites swarm through her body. Her gear is cannibalized to build her a new arm, leg, and hands; even her face is replaced with nanite skin.
As she stumbles away from the site of her rebirth, Nellie sees the powerful beams of the capital ship have scoured a good portion of the planet’s surface.
It is devastation beyond anything she could even imagine.
Swearing to never take the risk of being discovered again, heavy with guilt, Nellie stumbles off into the wilds with no plan other than to survive.
Over the next few days and weeks, she attacks animals to recover her flesh and regrow her face. She and Lucy come up with new gear. Gear that looks native to the area, nothing that would mark her as having nanites. A complete change of appearance for Nellie is completed thanks to her new nanite-altered face.
With time and a few misadventures, Nellie makes it back to the hub and sneaks in. Lucy implants a new identity for Nellie only to discover that Paren-Far had been arrested for speaking out in Nellie’s defense.
Unable to leave the girl to her fate, Nellie and Lucy go to the rescue. They arrive in time to save Paren from the prison guards who intend to assault and kill her. Leaving dead guards behind, they escape with the badly injured Paren-Far.
Paren’s injuries turn out to be worse than they could have guessed.
The teen had stolen the wrong thing, getting a look at weapons she was never meant to see. That was what had led to her imprisonment, and her interrogation left her half paralyzed, and the paralysis was spreading.
While Nellie and Lucy agonize over whether they should save Paren by converting her into a Drone with nanites, the brave teen decides her own fate.
She slits her throat with the deadly nanoblade she stole from Nellie.
Unwilling to let Paren die, Nellie activates the conversion process. In the process, she removed the last safeguards and lockouts on Lucy’s program.
===<<<>>>===
Paren awakes, still very much herself, other than the complete inability to ignore an order from Nellie.
While Lucy explains things to both Nellie and Paren, they prepare to take the next step.
The nanites remake Paren’s body from a Brackta into a younger version of Nellie’s current look. With the new cover of being sisters, they go to a nearby small town to get supplies.
Nothing ever goes quite according to plan for Nellie, and this is no exception. Before they know it, Nellie now owns a Ship Graveyard.
The locals are not exactly welcoming, assuming that Nellie and Paren are con artists, but they manage to smooth things over.
The next time they enter town, they find it deserted, with all sixty-odd residents gathered around a screen at the far end of town.
Much has happened while Nellie was in the wilds. The sector was declared locked down for the next year, and somehow, a war started. What makes it worse is the border sector is of no interest to the owning United Sector Alliance.
They abandon the sector to the invading United Federation of Peoples.
Sheriff Bartlett refuses to abandon the sector, and a battle rages in orbit as the planet watches.
The saucer is destroyed, and half of it falls from orbit, crashing just over the horizon from the stunned small town.
Claxons sound, the sector has fallen. As panic grips the small town, Nellie looks around and wonders how to ensure Paren and her survive.
Or could she do more?
BOOK TWO OVERVIEW
Nellie, Paren, and Lucy manage to do so much more than survive.
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While Nellie works to supply their yard and the nearby Village with food and supplies, she also takes action against the invading Federal forces in a series of nighttime raids and assassinations. Quickly becoming known as the Beacon, she rescues and helps wherever she can. All while scavenging for supplies that Lucy can use in her underground laboratory to make upgrades and plans for the future.
Making friends with the owner of a nearby Super Farm, known only as Duke, proves to be a wise choice as they help each other through the worsening situation on the planet itself. Clouds of dust thrown up by the attacks launched from Bartlett's ship have covered the skies, throwing the entire planet into permanent darkness and sending the already dangerous animals into a rage.
While the Feds maneuver and fight amongst themselves, Crush Cha escapes and joins Brix in leading an independent group of resistance fighters. It is while leading his own squad of crack troops in a raid against a hidden factory making undetectable synthetic life forms that he unwittingly crosses paths with Nellie once again. She, as the Beacon, had been supplying the base with food in exchange for some Synthetic Models for her own use.
The first of these, Salem, is the perfect assistant and administrator. Her only flaw is an obsessive drive for efficiency that rubs Paren the wrong way, not to mention the ever-troublesome Molly. While they argue, the other two Synths, Dar-Ken and Vey-Il, take guard duty as their security models are designed to do. Naturally, they have all been significantly upgraded by Lucy... who has plans for a synthetic body of her own.
The aftermath of the attack on the synthetic base is traumatic for Nellie and the others, but they leave with parts for more synthetics and a model that has been wiped of all higher functions when it was activated in emergency mode. It is while using it to assist her in building a body of her own that Nellie upgrades and repairs the Blank, naming it Baz due to the way it tried to pronounce 'basic.'
The wise-cracking and ever-so-slightly arrogant Baz initially clashes with the uptight Salem, but love and hate are so close together.
While all of this is happening, Prit-mal is slowly working her way up the chain of command within the Federal forces, proving herself invaluable to the invaders and catching the attention of the senior staff. It is as she comes to the attention of the leader of the invasion and his Chief Security Officer that the other boot finally drops on the cursed and broken planet. Eruptions on the far side of the planet as a result of the instability caused by Bertlett's attack. The last of the light is gone, tidal waves are hitting the shores... and all the animals are coming inland.
So begins the darkest time for the planet; as waves of monstrous creatures strike the walls, the two highest officers in the Fed forces begin to fight and clash with each other, leaving the majority of the population outside the cities to fend for themselves.
While everyone is struggling to survive, Crush and his people arrive at Duke's, discovering his hidden arc ship and being invited to leave the planet as soon as everything is ready. Nellie and the others are busy rescuing who they can as Molly seems to become more and more unfriendly, seeming to be begging to be left to fend for herself.
Refugees from the village and the unfairness of Molly's rules, along with a group of escaped synthetics rescued by a single Spy unit, renamed Remy by Nellie and Lucy, all join the crew as they fight together to survive the worst the planet has to offer.
Just as it seems that nothing else can go wrong, Prit-Mal is revealed as the leader of the Resistance forces after her covert actions are revealed. She takes control of the remaining Federal forces and Resistance fighters alike and announces an evacuation of the planet in mere days.
While Crush discovers Nellie is still alive, and Nellie and Lucy finally stop hiding and reveal themselves fully to those around them, they use the opportunity to join Duke's plan to leave the sectors behind as Lucy finally reveals the ship she has worked on since they first took over the Yard. The incredibly powerful Bly's Revenge, along with the fighting shuttle Resurgence, is fully armed and shielded.
After a final showdown with Molly, the treacherous bartender turned Mayor is revealed to be a Fed Agent; complete with her own secret bunker; they collect the final thing they need. An Exo System Engine to take them between star systems.
In all, three ships travel to the jump coordinates together. The Bly's Revenge, under Nellie's command; the Duke's Hope, an arc ship he designed to create the perfect colony beyond sector space; and the Last Chances, captained by Duke's sister and most likely a pirate.
Three ships, all headed into the unknown with only an uneasy alliance between them...
Book Three
Nellie’s ship, The Bly, is the only one to navigate the jump without trouble. The Arc is in horrific shape, dead in space and venting atmosphere, thanks to shortcuts and cheap shielding.
The Last Chances has overshot the target and is missing…
Nellie and Lucy are forced to save everyone on the Arc because no one else can. They tow the critically damaged ship to the nearest habitable moon, which orbits a primordial world of volcanos and rivers of lava.
While Duke and his people struggle to recover from the disastrous breakdown of their ship, Nellie and her crew scrap an abandoned space station to build their own, The Bly’s Rest.
Along the way, they discover the moon has occupants in the form of strange creatures called the Clutch. The strange creatures seem unworried about their new neighbors despite the apparent tech difference between them.
Forcing the colonists to leave the apparently primitive Cluth alone causes a rift between her and the Colony that never quite heals.
While Crush and the surviving members of his special forces squad are forced to become Marshalls to keep order, Duke and his Colonial Council spend days and weeks thinking about the future while ignoring the present.
Things seem to stabilize a little when Brix is elected Mayor to handle the everyday running of the Colony, but that only lasts until the sudden return of the Last Chances and its captain, Brenda DaVore.
While Brenda is given large amounts of space within the Colony in exchange for the goods she has stolen from others, Crush, and his people are rounded up and sent to an unbuilt section of the Colony as punishment for running rings around the corrupt and inept council.
In between discovering the Clutch is so far beyond technology that they appear to use something close to magic in the form of crystals and trying to plan for a future, Nellie and Lucy discover their old enemy, the I.E.S., used to have a serious presence in the system.
A number of facilities are discovered and searched for some of the advanced tech that the I.E.S. uses so liberally to maintain its power in the galaxy. What they find is so much worse than they could ever have imagined. Experimentation on live humanoids, torture, and so much worse abound, while most decent tech has apparently already been taken when the I.E.S. abandoned the system. Little did they know that the next facility, on the volcanic planet itself, held even more nightmares that would change them forever.
While the Synthetic crew members construct thrones for their two queens (Nellie and Lucy) in secret, hiding their decision to proclaim the two as queens of their people even from the pair themselves, and upgrades are done to all the basic synthetic models and even the Centrum units Lucy designed as guards and soldiers, Paren throws herself into experimentation in her lab.
From the heavily modified Crawlers to the moss that she took from the moon (cannibalistic moss, the universe is full of wonders and terrors) to designs for advanced tech that beggar belief, everyone has to admit that there might not BE a limit to Paren’s intellect, or her talent for making nightmares a reality. She even manages to take four spare Synthetic cores and craft beings with a single mind and limitless bodies—the Cents.
While the colony slides down a path to civil war thanks to Brenda and her people, Crush plans to lead his people away to live in a new spot closer to the Embassy built and run by the nanite-infused cyborg and born rebel, Banjo.
Lucy herself is even more distracted by the discovery of a massive and growing egg-shaped object that even her nanites can not penetrate or affect.
There is something about it that triggers a long-forgotten memory…
Not long after the colony split in two, Crush uses Clutch tech to make a large farming empire, while Duke reveals his true nature. The son of a famously brutal family, he had tried to live as a simple farmer… at least until something got in his way.
Now, with his sister by his side and most of the council dead, he enacts his will with not a thought for others' opinions. Surely now, his rise will continue, right?
Duke’s delusions of grandeur are interrupted by the arrival of the very company his sister stole from.
The Imperial Line.
Their representative, Carter, only wants one thing in exchange… the lives of most of his colony. To make matters worse, he seems to consider Nellie of much greater importance than Duke.
Carter even registers the system as belonging to the Twin Queens of the Spark—Nellie and Lucy. The station administrator, Salem, has seen her chance to make the royalty thing a reality and has taken full advantage of it. Nellie and Lucy are now officially royalty to the wider universe.
While a tentative deal is agreed upon, the Imperial Line ship notices the Clutch, a mortal enemy of the Line, and opens fire. This forces Nellie to destroy the ship, and Carter flees to the Colony, striking a deal with Duke for protection.
Duke, certain in his assessment of Nellie and her people, is still certain of his victory. No matter what he does, Duke is sure that Nellie will not take action against him.
His information is, besides completely self-aggrandizing, horrifically out of date.
The facility on the volcanic planet contained two things that changed Nellie for good. The first is an anti-nanite weapon that nearly kills her and Lucy. The moment of staring helplessly at Lucy’s seemingly dead body echoes constantly in Nellie’s subconscious.
The Nanite improvements in her mind (including a ‘class’ copied from the illustrious and frankly weird Wasta Brill- a copy of the weasel-man included) accelerate to unbelievable levels as she takes direct control over the nanites in her body. The changes daisy chain through her systems as she struggles to save not just herself, but Lucy’s body from the elements and the other secrets inside the facility.
One of those secrets is an unknown creature that the IES took apart piece by piece and stuffed into a metal orb to work like an AI. They abandoned the project and the creature an unknown time ago.
The robotic body it built itself is basic but functional. Nellie, however, can offer it so much more than that. Rescuing the creature, Robot, from the facility and hearing his story further changes Nellie.
Something soft and merciful inside her hardens into steel.
The strange refugees continue to come as a friend of Nellie’s in the colony dies, leaving his adopted daughter to Nellie. ‘The Girl’ is not only nameless but has more tech inside her than anyone other than Nellie. Whatever she is, The Girl is a killer and now Nellie’s adopted daughter.
Fending off an attack by Carter’s backup goes smoothly enough but ushers in another threat—the Imperial Line quick response fleet is on its way.
Duke leads his people against the other Colony and the Clutch, while Nellie and her people are caught off guard by an attack earlier than expected.
Crush and his troops are out of place, defending the Clutch while his people are getting slaughtered by Duke. Meanwhile, up above, a massive fleet attacks Nellie and her ships, while a Capital Ship docks with the station and begins to invade.
As the battle rages above and below, Salem and Paren work together to make the invading forces regret ever being born.
A favorite of both the women and Robot, a synthetic named Cix-El, dies to save his friends, and Salem and Robot both lose what little temper they have left. As troops are burned alive in Salem’s wrath Robot breaks the last controls on his behavior and builds himself a body capable of death on an unimaginable level.
What little chance the troops had vanish as they fan out through the station and fall prey to Paren’s creatures and The Girl.
In the space between planets, war rages as Nellie and Lucy unleash their beam weapons on the enemy fleet, cutting it apart even as their ships take critical damage.
Seeing this play out on the scan screens, Brenda launches her ship in her bloodlust to kill Nellie. Duke continues his attack on the unprotected colony, unaware that Carter is getting further away second by second.
The canny operator had seen which way the wind was blowing and hightailed it for the sectors.
While the synthetic commander Vey sacrifices himself and his ship for the queens, Nellie uses the Bly itself as a weapon, ramming one of the few remaining Imperial Line ships.
The last remnants of the Imperial Line fleet line up their last attacks, and Nellie and Lucy prepare to give their all as the Last Chances break from the atmosphere and head on an intercept course.
On the moon, Crush desperately tries to evacuate his wounded and dying squad while Duke and his people find their slaughter interrupted by the arrival of Banjo and his troops. The enraged Duke lines up a shot at Crush’s partner, Vicky, out of pure vindictive hatred, only for Banjo to jump in the way.
Dying in the attempt, Banjo saves Vicky as an unearthly scream of pain and rage echoes from every connected speaker in the system as Nellie loses her temper.
Having rescued Banjo herself, Nellie takes his death as the final straw. Without thought, she seizes control of millions of nanites and prepares to reduce her enemies to dust.
Lucy prevents Nellie from using the nanites as a weapon, the very act that had caused the nanites to be driven to near extinction in the Sectors, and manages to take the edge of her anger.
Returning to the fight, Nellie activates the hidden nanites on Brenda’s ship and renders it useless.
The Imperial Line fleet is wiped out, and on the surface, Duke learns precisely how badly he has misjudged the situation but still believes that Nellie can be talked around. He is left to fret and plan while Nellie and her people scour the surface of the moon for any survivors that can be saved.
Crush and his people are almost dead, but to a nanite, nearly is nowhere near a problem. The entire squad of Marshalls and most of the second colony are converted into drones, joining the newly christened Nanite Imperium.
Duke gets a nasty surprise at the town meeting a couple of nights later as Nellie arrives with a bound and struggling Brenda in tow. The two are executed publicly, eaten alive by Paren’s crawlers before the entire colony is loaded onto a ship and sent back to the sectors with a one-way ticket.
As peace settles over the system, Nellie and her crew are left to recover and rebuild in a sector now littered with an entire fleet’s worth of salvage, and the egg, so fascinating to Lucy, has suddenly grown even larger. The planet cools, plants begin to appear, and a small crack forms just after an automated drone is sucked inside…