HEROES FORGED OF IRON: The Battle for Starlight Mountain

They came for the iron. They didn't expect the ironworkers. Mario Balcom came to Colony 13 for a simple contract: build a lattice framework strong enough to support the moon colony's new heavy-crawler excavators. Six weeks of hard work, triple scale, then back home to Earth and the daughters waiting for his weekly calls. Then something tears through the dome. A hostile alien force descends on Starlight Mountain, cutting through the colony's defenses and hunting its people through pressurized corridors. Colony security is overwhelmed within minutes. The nearest rescue is hours away. And Mario's crew-twelve ironworkers armed with plasma torches, welders, rigging cable, and construction tools-are the only ones left standing between hundreds of civilians and extinction. But these workers know steel. They know load paths, pressure, heat, leverage, and what happens when a structure is pushed past its limits. In a fabrication bay full of raw metal and industrial machinery, they will turn a job site into a fortress-and then into a trap. As the siege stretches from desperate survival into something larger, Mario must confront the cost of leadership, the weight of every life he can't save, and the question of what ordinary people owe one another when the world breaks open. A fast-paced science fiction survival thriller about courage, sacrifice, working-class heroes, and the kind of people who build things that hold.