Rust Gambit: Progenitors (Junk Fleet Book 3)

By Carl Wang

The people who built the rust have come to collect. For six weeks, the ship has hung at the edge of the solar system - forty kilometers of dark, covered in writing that moves. Then it deletes a moon as a demonstration, and posts a deadline on every screen on Earth: PRESENT YOUR PRIME SPECIMEN FOR COLLECTION. 30 DAYS. They call themselves Progenitors. They seeded the rust as an experiment. Twelve species have already failed the test - catalogued, corrected, erased. Humanity is thirteen, and the specimen they want is Cass Vero: the amnesiac captain who freed ten thousand ghosts and remembers almost none of it. She has three memories, a journal, and a crew that keeps the receipts. The Colonial Fleet wants to hand her over. Half her fleet wants to arm up and fight. And the only being who ever defied the Progenitors - the mother Cass never knew - has left half her blood in Cass's veins, and a war she never finished. To save Earth, Cass can rebuild her mother from that blood - and become something the procedure has never seen. To stay Cass, she may have to lose everything else. Because this trial won't be won with weapons. It will be decided by the one thing ten thousand years of procedure has never once tested: whether a small, chosen life is worth more than a kept one.

Junk Fleet, Book 3 - first contact with the makers, a trial judged by something that doesn't believe in meaning, and a found family that refuses to be filed. Best read in order, starting with Rust Gambit: Unwanted.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H5JX1YH9
• ISBN13: 9798181819160
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"