VELOCITY WEAPON

O’Keefe turns from fantasy novels (The Proposal Game, 2018, etc.) to sci-fi with the
story of a spacefaring soldier who wakes up on an enemy ship alone—save for the
ship itself.

The last thing Sanda Greeve remembers is her ship being attacked
by rebel forces. She’s resuscitated from her evacuation pod missing half a
leg—and two centuries—as explained to her by the AI of the rebel ship that
rescued her. As The Light of Berossus—aka Bero—tells her, she may be the only living human for light-years
around, as the war wiped both sides out long ago. Sanda struggles to process
her injuries and her grief but finds friendship with the lonely spaceship
itself. Sanda’s story is interspersed with flashbacks to the war’s effects on
her brother, Biran, as well as scenes from a heist gone terribly wrong for
small-time criminal Jules. The three narratives, separated by a vast gulf of
time, are more intertwined than is immediately apparent. When Sanda rescues
Tomas, another unlikely survivor, from his own evacuation pod, she learns that
even time doesn’t end all wars. Should she trust Tomas, a fellow human but a
rebel soldier who has his own secrets—or Bero,
the ship that saved her? It’s the first twist in a story that fires them like
railguns. Every hard-earned victory for Sanda, Biran, or Jules is turned on its
head as new information is revealed, and the tension is as tight as the
pressure seal on a spacesuit. Yet the story still makes room for the classic
questions of science fiction: What counts as a person, and what does it mean to
be humane at any time, let alone in wartime?

Meticulously plotted, edge-of-your-seat space opera with a soul;
a highly promising science-fiction debut.