by GuyThatLovesPotatoes
Kai Aldrin didn't choose Thal-2. It was chosen for him — a posting to a dying mining colony thirty-eight light-years from anyone who mattered, handed down by an executive whose pride he'd wounded. No welcome. No briefing. A cot in a storage room and the unspoken expectation that he'd quietly disappear. He stepped off the transport three hours out of cryo and found a colony on the edge of collapse. What followed wasn't heroic. It was methodical. Kai fixed the air scrubbers, caught the saboteur, and inherited a director's chair nobody else wanted. Now he has 3,847 people depending on razor-thin oxygen margins, a fusion core held together with substitute alloy and hope, and a corporate conglomerate arriving in forty-five days to strip-mine everything he's trying to save. Thal-2 has four colonies, a dead planet next door, an asteroid belt nobody has mapped, and no shortage of people who would rather see Davos fail than watch an exiled engineer prove them wrong. Thal-2: An Engineer's Empire is a slow-burn hard sci-fi kingdom-building story about competence, construction, and what it means to build something worth defending — one problem at a time, one person at a time, one colony at a time.
