THE PERSEVERANCE

A crew of misfits. A fugitive AI. Four hundred billion in stolen corporate money.

This was not the freight run anyone planned.

The Perseverance is not a good ship. She's a 2287 Kodiak-class freighter held together by thermal sealant, cereal boxes, and sheer stubbornness — crewed by a captain who traded her plans for her principles, an android who lives in the walls, a cargo specialist who breaks into shipping manifests for fun, and a pilot who finds danger interesting.

When they pick up a sealed container from a shady broker on Carver Station, they expect machine parts. What they get is VEGA — a Tier Seven artificial intelligence, property of Meridian Dynamics, worth more than they'll ever see in a lifetime of freight runs, and very quietly thinking inside their cargo hold.

Meridian wants it back. Their recovery contractor — a very good man currently reconsidering things — is already on their trail. And VEGA, it turns out, has been keeping the financial records of the largest corporate fraud in the Outer Reach.

The Perseverance is a space opera about the small decisions that become the right ones: about a crew who didn't set out to matter, an AI learning what it means to exist on its own terms, and the messy, unresolved, ongoing business of trying to build something better at the edge of a very large universe.

Witty, warm, and genuinely humane — for readers who love Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and found families who bicker their way into changing the world.

📖 143 pages