Unity Captives — R.W. Van Sant

UNITY CAPTIVES When humanity escaped to the stars, greed and tyranny came along for the ride.

When Tod Riley takes a job building Dritta's new space station, he never suspects his desire for freedom and adventure among the stars would lead him into deadly peril. With a salvaged travel pod, he flies between the ice and rock of the planet rings and dreams of visiting other worlds. His dreams turn to nightmares when the Unity starship Grissom arrives in the system, bringing the tyrannical rules of the Unity with them. When violence erupts on the station, the colonists are able to turn the Unity regulations to their favor and compel the newly repaired and resupplied ship to leave the system.

Regrettably, it does not leave alone.

Tod finds himself among a group of colonists forcibly abducted from their colony's space station, deprived of freedom and impressed into the service of the Unity fleet. Forced into a nightmare dystopia, injury and degradation takes them further from the home world they may never see again. The crew treats them as criminals and slaves. Only the dream of eventual release and freedom keep them going. One of the colonists discovers that the last battle had not been with the rebels, but a merchant ship carrying harmless colonists. Every person on board was killed. The captain had committed murderous acts of piracy, and Tod realized that he and the others will never be allowed to leave the starship alive.

Now Tod must find a way to escape the Grissom before he becomes the next victim of the tyrannical captain's greed and lust for glory. But how can he possibly hope to cross the light years that separate him from his home world?