Salt Engines

When a stolen breakthrough in energy refinement turns a drifting flotilla into a target, survival stops being about firepower and starts being about responsibility.

Jace is a pilot who lives by one rule: never steal from the Syndicate twice. Elara is an engineer who designed a system meant to end scarcity, only to watch it weaponized by the Syndicate that controls the Belt. Together, with a handful of allies, they turn a desperate escape into something more dangerous than rebellion: independence.

Hunted across collapsing refineries and mined corridors, the Rust Tide does not win by outrunning its enemies or destroying them. It survives by building infrastructure the Syndicate cannot reclaim, sharing knowledge that cannot be monopolized, and choosing limits over domination.

This is a space opera about engines instead of empires, about repair instead of conquest, and about what happens after the chase ends.
Because freedom that only works once is not freedom at all.