« Serengeti » J. B. Rockwell

It was supposed to be an easy job: find the Dark Star Revolution Starships, destroy them, and go home.

But a booby–trapped vessel decimates the Meridian Alliance fleet, leaving Serengeti — a Valkyrie class warship with a sentient AI brain — on her own; wrecked and abandoned in an empty expanse of space. On the edge of total failure,

Serengeti thinks only of her crew.

She herds the survivors into a lifeboat, intending to sling them into space. But the escape pod sticks in her belly, locking the cryogenically frozen crew inside.

Then a scavenger ship arrives to pick Serengeti’s bones clean. Her engine’s dead, her guns long silenced; Serengeti and her last two robots must find a way to fight the scavengers off and save the crew trapped inside her.