Some cargo pays in credits. Some pays in coordinates.
When Rian Vale and his crew push a battered freighter through a collapsing quarantine corridor to deliver black-market medicine to a dying colony, they don't expect a payment they can't refuse — coordinates to a station listed dead for decades. The kind of dead that powerful people worked very hard to make permanent.
What they find isn't salvage. It isn't empty. And it doesn't stay quiet.
Dead Cargo is the first book in the Starwake Saga — a gritty space opera about a crew held together by bad luck, sharper instincts, and the kind of loyalty that only shows up when the ship is already falling apart. Set against the cold machinery of empire, old quarantine scars, and something ancient that's been waiting for the right listeners, this is science fiction built on fractured trust, honest stakes, and the cost of making the right call too late.
Cohl Marten writes science fiction built on one principle: every decision has a cost, and someone pays it. His work explores crews navigating unstable routes, damaged infrastructure, and systems that no longer behave the way they were designed to. With a focus on logistics, consequence, and human judgment under pressure, his stories replace spectacle with structure—and let the outcomes speak.View all by Cohl Marten
