Cade Brennan spent fifteen years keeping his head down in the asteroid belt. Good worker. Quiet. Didn’t ask questions the company didn’t want answered. It was the only way to survive out here — and it worked, until the day it stopped working.
When a cave-in at Shaft 7 kills three of his crew, Cade starts pulling maintenance logs. What he finds isn’t negligence. It’s a program — systematic equipment downgrades across the entire sector, signed off at the regional director level, hidden in the books as a cost-savings initiative. Forty-seven “accidents” in three years. Forty-seven sets of death benefits the company never paid.
Now corporate security knows he found it. And in the belt, there’s no such thing as a quiet disappearance.
With a kill-team closing in and a crew that didn’t sign up for any of this, Cade has two choices: hand over the data and hope for mercy from the people who just murdered his coworkers, or run dark and pray they make it to somewhere the company’s reach doesn’t extend.
There’s no third option. He checked.
Slag is Book 1 of the Belt Wars trilogy — working-class science fiction set in the asteroid belt, 2180s.