The Salvager's Plague

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Salvage Engineer Thomas Aacen swore he'd never work with Captain Barstol again, but was blackmailed into it.

The blackmail was falsified, but even still, it might have been better to just let him spill it, cause now he was abandoned for dead on a remote planetoid with no atmosphere, desperately looking for a way to survive.

But that is just the beginning of his troubles, when his attempt to survive unearths the truth about the ship Captain Barstol just hauled away. A truth that would put the whole quadrant in danger.

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2024
Author: TheAcornScribe

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.4/ 5.0
Followers: 41
Views: 20,018

Reviews

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Community Reviews(2)

Octocat8Royal Road
★★★★ 4.0
A rather enjoyable read about space travel, encountering new (and old) alien species, sentient AI, politics, crime and xenophobia.
Oh and a plague that can change the galaxy as we know it. High stakes.
The MC seems quite competent, other characters are more than two dimensional and often have their own agendas.
Style is good and understandable. Grammar is fine.
A big part of this story is exploring alternative relationships/poly. A treat for those who like the topic.
cursedclarkeRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
The Salvager’s Plague is a sci-fi survival story where a man gets abandoned on a forgotten rock in space and proceeds to crawl, curse, and argue his way through one technical malfunction after another. The protagonist, Thomas Aacen, is a salvage engineer with a knack for survival and a personality like a worn-out wrench. He is cynical, capable, and just angry enough to be interesting. If there is one thing this book gets right, it is his voice. It is consistent, grounded, and stubbornly human, even when the rest of the story starts wandering.
The opening is tight. The setup is effective. A betrayal, a dwindling oxygen supply, and the threat of dying alone in an airless tunnel. The tension is there, the stakes are high, and the pacing holds up. But the longer the book goes on, the more it starts to sag under its own weight. Thomas spends an enormous amount of time crawling through ducts, reciting tool usage, or narrating the features of a suit system you only needed to hear about once. Every piece of hardware gets a name, a backstory, and a full personality profile. At times, it feels like reading a technical manual written by someone who forgot this is supposed to be a novel.
The dialogue ranges from sharp to bloated. Thomas and Stacy, the sentient station AI, have real chemistry. She is flirtatious, lonely, and weirdly charming. Their exchanges are often funny and strangely sweet, even when she makes jokes that sound like they came from an unfiltered chatbot. But every character in the book talks a lot. They explain themselves constantly. Conversations often repeat information the reader already knows, sometimes in the same scene. It slows everything down. You get the sense that the characters do not trust each other or the audience to remember anything unless it is said three different ways.
Jophixa, the station’s security officer, arrives late in the book and brings some welcome conflict. She is hostile, blunt, and borderline unhinged, which makes her a fun addit