Emergence

Centuries before the events of Enduring: The Fall of Earth, humanity is still struggling to make its way among the stars.

Earth has survived two more world wars, but survival has come at a staggering cost. Humanity has returned to space not as a great interstellar power, but as a collection of workers, traders, mechanics, haulers, mercenaries, and families trying to scrape together a living on the edges of a much larger civilization.

Captain Maggie "Mother" Kimman and the mismatched family aboard the Dojamarck know that life well. They take the work they can get, repair what they can't afford to replace, and depend on one another when everything else fails.

When a corporate contract sends them after raiders preying on commercial shipping, it looks like another chance to earn enough money to keep the ship flying. But the job becomes something very different when they discover that the people they have been hired to hunt may not be so different from themselves.

A Hardscrabble Space Life is the first novella in the Emergence series, set within the larger Enduring Universe-a story of family, survival, hard choices, and ordinary people trying to build a better tomorrow in a rough and often lawless human frontier.