“Being scourge of the galaxy involved more work than he counted on as a young lad; still, he did get to kill the customers and was his own boss.”
Plot Summary: Julian McAllister, son of an escaped slave, is a favorite son of the Riftward Marches; a loose confederation of colonies founded by pirates, smugglers and mercenaries pushed back over the centuries by the expanding Free Trade Federation. In contact with a dissident naval architect, he conceives the greatest theft in history: to steal the Navy’s most advanced warship, refitting her as a corsair.
Initially successful, he leads his wing, the Lords of Entropy, to the remote Fringeward Expanse and proceeds to terrorize Federation shipping there. Setting themselves up as major players in the region, they make their way home to find the Rift undergoing a genocidal incursion, inspired in no small part by Julian’s recent antics. Assuming command of a hastily assembled fleet of pirate warships and refugee transports, Captain McAllister and the corsairs of the Riftward Marches begin a long journey to establish a new homeland.
En route, they uncover a Federation project called “The Ascendance,” a plan to elevate the human condition by eliminating its surplus population. After wreaking havoc across colonized space the corsairs succeed in capturing a new system to call their own, but Julian is unprepared for his new role as unwitting folk hero and political figurehead of the rebellion churned in his wake.
