The Siege of Blackstone: Last Man on Khepri Rock

He had a rifle, a knife, and a mining claim thirty years dead. That was enough. When the Directorate heavy cruiser Dragon Banner limps into the shattered mining crater of Khepri Rock for emergency repairs, her commander expects a quiet, unmolested stopover - thirty-six hours, in and out, no one the wiser. He doesn't know he isn't alone. Corporal Kenji Sato is the last survivor of an escort cruiser destroyed defending a convoy hours earlier - one marine, a dwindling stock of scavenged oxygen, and a dying lieutenant's final order ringing in his ears: Delay them. However you can. Whatever it costs. No rescue is coming. What follows is a sixteen-day siege fought entirely in reverse - one man against a three-hundred-crew warship, waged with a rifle, a knife, stolen equipment, and a torsion catapult built from a thirty-year-old mining excavator. Every hour Kenji buys is an hour the convoy survives. Every hour costs him a little more of the air he has left to breathe. Aboard Dragon Banner, Commodore Liu Zheng begins the engagement certain he faces a battalion. He ends it understanding he faced one man - and that the five days Corporal Sato cost him were exactly the five days that mattered. THE SIEGE OF BLACKSTONE is a hard-SF military thriller about the arithmetic of duty: what one soldier can accomplish when survival stops being the point, and delay becomes the entire mission. For readers of classic siege fiction and lone-holdout war stories reforged for the age of vacuum, low gravity, and warships that can't simply be outrun.