The Copper Keel

The drydocks of Shiranami are locked in iron chains. Under the ruthless eye of the naval provost, any shipwright caught altering hulls without a military clearance chit is hanged from the yardarms. Fumitaka only agreed to refit a privateer sloop in the dead of night because it was the only way to buy passage out of the disease-choked port for his foundling apprentices. But as he hammers the final heavy copper resonance plates onto the ship's keel, he uncovers the vessel's true purpose: it is not built to slip past the blockade, but to act as a massive kinetic bomb to ram the great sea-doors and drown Shiranami in a catastrophic tidal flood. With extremist zealots on one side and provost marines hunting him through the flooded slipways on the other, Fumitaka must take apart the ship he painstakingly built from the inside before it launches—and destroy his only way out.