Through the Asteroids—To Hell!

The asteroid belt is a meat grinder. Every ship that tries to run the Tunnel without clearance becomes another crater, another lesson in the price of shortcuts. Blair Freedman knows this better than anyone, he's one of the few pilots mad enough or skilled enough to fly the Patrol, threading the only safe passage through a hail of spinning rock and guarding it against raiders, smugglers, and the armies massing on two hostile satellites. War is coming. The tension between the colonies has reached breaking point, and the Tunnel is the only supply line that matters. Freedman volunteers for every dangerous run, chasing the glory his father never earned and the respect he can't quite earn either. But as the conflict escalates, he begins to wonder what he's actually fighting for, and whether the Tunnel will still be there when the real battle begins. This is 1940s space opera at its lean and mean: starship gunfights, impossible piloting maneuvers, and a hero who's more haunted than heroic. Yerxa writes with the kind of hardboiled efficiency that made pulp fiction sing, and the result is a book that knows exactly what it wants to be and never apologizes for it.