Blood on My Jets

Ash Holcomb has dirty hands and he knows it. Years of working Earth's classified operations, the wet work that other spooks pretend doesn't exist, have left their mark. Now he wants out. Somewhere quiet, somewhere far from the violence he helped perpetrate in service to a cause he can no longer trust. But Pat McKay walks back into his life with copper hair, brown eyes, and a job that pulls him right back into the muck. His former friend Harry Thorsten has discovered something dangerous: a new hyperspatial drive that could shift the balance of power across the solar system. Ash finds himself caught between factions, old loyalties, and the brutal arithmetic of betrayal. The job goes wrong. It always goes wrong. And Ash discovers that some blood never washes off, no matter how far you run. This is 1950s space opera with the heroics stripped away, a noir-inflected tale about the cost of service and the impossibility of outrunning your own past.