The Tales from the Michigan Fleet series takes a darker turn in Run Aground, when Rich and friends with benefits and perks Liam disappear after attending a landside hoverboard tournament. Given his Hastings “soldier mod” background, (and the party responsible for the kidnapping) there is little hope of being able to find, let alone rescue him.
(Hastings have an ethnoreligion where they believe they are all made in Mar’s–Roman god of war, not the planet–image, and that they are the “Player Characters” in a gamified universe–and everyone else is an NPC. Which I guess is something you’re going to come up with when the actual fact is that you were made by a white supremacist billionaire to be his private army. With this kind of reputation, getting someone landside willing to look for Rich is nearly impossible.)
Meanwhile, former actor Rafael Caro, who has been held for years in the “harem” of Arthur Caraway–a Lykoi soldier-mod. An extremely rich, horrible soldier-mod–and has been slowly going out of his mind. Neither he nor his fellow inmates are there because they want to be, and stress, depression, and continuous trauma has reduced him to a shadow of himself. The only benefit of this is that he is no longer interesting as a chew toy for Caraway.
This changes when he meets one of Carraway’s recent kidnapees. Rafael is at first terrified of the Hastings, but since “the Hastings” is actually Rich Merril, he soon discovers that Rich is basically the sweetest, kindest, most helpful person around. (While also being pretty traumatized by what he’s going through with Carraway, and with Carraway holding not one, but TWO of Rich’s friends prisoner. It turns out that Carraway decided to abscond with his financial advisor, Signore Solace King–who is someone Rich previously ran into, and had a great time with. Small world!)
Run Aground is much longer, and also a lot darker than After the Storm. This is about abuse of power, unequal power dynamics–and survival. With that said, it’s not nearly as bleak as it could have been. Rich has somewhat recovered from his experiences pre-After the Storm, and while he does fall into bad coping mechanisms, he has also learned how to make friends and influence people. Rich does his best to protect his friends, taking advantage of their captor’s ignorance, and using their prejudices against them.
Meanwhile, Basil and Thena go looking for Rich on their own, and make some discoveries. Discoveries that will be extremely helpful in extracting Rich and the others from Bordello Alcatraz. Run Aground is available on the Michigan Fleet site, Royal Road and Smashwords.
I really loved the outsider pov in Run Aground. Rafael has the dramatics of a theater kid, and the soul of a poet. His character arc as he breaks out of the despair he’d been buried in left me kind of teary-eyed. There is a lot of great worldbuilding in Run Aground as well. We get to see more of the post-apocalyptic world of the Michigan Fleet setting, and learn more about how the US got split up after the various environmental collapses and civil wars. Run Aground continues the “erotica that is also great sf,” quality that began with After the Storm.
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