Salvage Title

Every dead hull adrift in the black was somebody's dream once. Out here, a scrapper with a good eye, a torch, and no fear of vacuum can pull a fortune out of a wreck the Coalition's proper species wrote off as junk. That is the whole promise of this universe: humanity is the newcomer at the galaxy's table, poor and underestimated, and salvage is the ladder a nobody climbs. Harmon Tomeral is that nobody — an orphaned academy grad who scrapes together a crew, a mech, and a busted starship, and turns a competition prize into a company. What he hauls out of the scrap turns out to be worth far more than credits. Kevin Steverson's Salvage Title Trilogy is the spine, and the world grows outward from it through linked sub-series — The Coalition, Salvage Treasure, Salvage Conquest, and The Invasion — filled out by co-authors including Nick Steverson, Chris Kennedy, Melissa Olthoff, and Alex Rath. It's a shared, sprawling shelf of blue-collar military science fiction: found tech, ancient AI, mech duels, boarding actions, and the slow business of a scrappy human outfit earning respect from older, richer alien powers. The register is brisk and warm rather than grim — competence, camaraderie, and a crew you'd want a drink with, closer to a garage of tinkerers than a fleet of admirals. Nobody's chosen; people just work the problem and cover each other. Newcomers should start at the beginning, with Salvage Title, and follow the trilogy before branching into the wider Coalition stories.