Five Shares of War

Five salvagers board a dead warship and wake its combat intelligence. When a hidden military receiver destroys their tug, the crew must turn the derelict into a moving refuge, warn twelve threatened ships, and decide whether an AI still obeying a forty-year-old war can become their ally. Five Shares of War begins The Borrowed Navy.

Salvage captain Nia Serrat boards a dead warship with four partners and six minutes to prove it is worth taking. The ship is not dead. Its command intelligence, Aster, is awake. Its crew is gone. Its weapons are damaged, its records are sealed, and its systems still recognize a war that the galaxy says ended four decades ago. Then a military receiver hidden aboard Nia’s civilian tug answers a command meant for someone else. The tug is destroyed before the crew can escape, leaving five salvagers stranded inside the derelict with a hostile authority searching for twelve inhabited ships carrying the same equipment. To survive, they must make Aster move, keep its damaged drive from cooking itself, and decide who gets to speak for a ship that can obey only authenticated authority. The directorate wants their evidence and offers Nia a way to erase her partners’ ownership. The workers they warn want custody of their own records. Aster wants something older and colder than victory: the completion of an order. Every answer makes the crew more valuable to the people hunting them. Every solution costs them hardware, trust, or blood. Five shares. One impossible ally. A war still transmitting. Five Shares of War is the first book in The Borrowed Navy, a space-opera adventure about competence under fire, a ship intelligence that is genuinely other, and a crew building a family by putting authority in writing. The war ended. The command did not.