The Sufficient Loss Protocol: A Tor.com Original

By Kemi Ashing-Giwa

When an alien entity sneaks aboard a corporate spaceship, with no motive besides sabotaging the mission and murdering those aboard, commander Uzoma Ifiok launches an investigation—despite knowing that the real danger isn't the one picking off her crew.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250835420

Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Kemi Ashing-Giwa was born and raised in Southern California, where she grew up on a steady diet of sci-fi and fantasy. She has an undergraduate degree in integrative biology and astrophysics from Harvard University and is currently a PhD student in the Earth and planetary sciences department at Stanford University. She is the author of the novel The Splinter in the Sky and the forthcoming novella This World Is Not Yours.

Book preview

From my place at the center of The Preserver’s spacious bridge, I watched a world end. The world was—had been—called New Horizons. It’d been a mining colony, meant to coax platinum and gold from the asteroid it squatted upon. But then it had turned out that the initial scans had been dead wrong. Better Suns sent in carriers to transport the colonists and all the tech to a frozen rock that was actually worth something. The colonists had demanded payment for the work they’d completed—digging out quarries, analyzing rock samples, whatever. Better Suns had refused; no profits, no pay. It was all in the contracts. The colonists threatened to revolt.

That might’ve been an acceptable outcome, since there weren’t any Corporation officials to string up. But there was a bunch of extremely expensive mining equipment, and the colonists started to wreck that first. So I had been sent to dispose of the colonists. At the moment, I watched through the colony’s video feed—displayed over the window screen of the bridge—as the inhabitants froze to