The Navy sent its dead ships here for four hundred years. Then it sent nothing at all.
Callan's Yard is a shipbreaking world: one company town, six kilometres of cutting berths, and an orbital graveyard holding the largest concentration of warship tonnage within twenty light-years — none of it flyable.
When the Navy abandons the frontier and an alien force starts stripping the planet with the patience of a work crew on schedule, the breakers do the only thing four generations of them know how to do. They open the dead fleet — this time to put one back together.
The manifest so far.
Start with the free prequel novella, then Book 1 — the series runs in order from there, and each book finishes its own fight.
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Book 0
Prequel novella
Planned — free for the reader listA standalone story from Callan's Yard, set before the withdrawal. Free for newsletter subscribers when it's ready — the list hears first.
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Book 1
Salvage Rights
In productionThe relay is dead, the orbitals are taken, and the enemy is digging for something under the old northern flats. To fight back, the Yard needs a warship — and the only ones left are the museum hulls nobody wanted. Restoring a four-hundred-year-old destroyer would be the hardest job the breakers have ever done, even if the law said they could keep her. The law might. The Registry says otherwise.
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Book 2+
The war widens
OutlinedEach book wakes a bigger, older, stranger hull — and the questions get worse. Why did the Navy really leave? Why did the enemy know where to dig? And what has been hanging in the Slow Lane, unopened, for forty years?
Entries from the Yard's ledger.
The series is built on how this world actually works — the gravity people grew up in, the law that makes salvage legal, the procedure that wakes a dead ship, and the crews who know the way through.
World / Callan's Yard
A rust-and-slate world under a small white sun.
Every flat surface for six hundred kilometres is stacked with hull sections, oxidising from raw silver to deep ochre. At night the cutting torches make a scattered constellation across the ground brighter than anything overhead.
People / The Yardborn
Four generations at 0.7g.
Long-boned, low-massed, able to judge mass and moment by eye to a standard instruments struggle to match. The Navy's medical board has never passed one for shipboard service — which is why the Yard's people spent four centuries taking apart warships they were never permitted to crew.
Trade / Lay-up
A properly mothballed ship keeps for a century.
Reactor drained, atmosphere pulled, drives pickled, the whole hull sealed under inert gas. Waking her is the same procedure in reverse, in the correct order — and the correct order is the whole difference between a warship and a bomb.
Crew / The Deadwater Haulers
The only living chart of the drift.
Tug crews, debt-bound and unbothered by Registry title, who hold the only route through the orbital debris in living memory — chanted as litanies, turn counts and burn times set to a tune. After the invasion, the smugglers' lane is the only approach to the enemy's orbitals.
First word when Book 1 lifts.
Launch news for the series and the free prequel novella when it's ready. Nothing else, ever.
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