Choir of Hatred

Salvage Crew #3

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

War is hell. Especially in interstellar combat.

There, the distances between you and the enemy are counted in decades and the payout might not even cover the funerals for the people you lose on the way.

Meet the Rubber Ducks. A crew that raises eyebrows, contracts measured in light-years and body counts, led by an AI with memories that nobody really wants to question. Officially a catering company, unofficially one of the deadliest mercenary outfits still roaming the stars after the UN-ORCA wars. In the right circles, for the right contract, the guns come out, and someone always dies. The only thing they can't fight is reality itself.

Set in the world of The Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines, this new book by award-winning author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne explores a grim universe where everything is a function of power and profit. From the dark edges of interstellar space comes a tale of warfare, artificial intelligence, and the fine line between killing others - and killing yourself.

Genres: Science Fiction

302 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 15, 2025

About the author

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a Nebula-nominated science fiction author and data scientist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. By day he is a senior researcher with the Data, Algorithms and Policy team at LIRNEasia, working at the intersection of technology and government policy.

He is the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organization that sprung up in the wake of the April 2019 bombings in Sri Lanka. He built and operates @osunpoet, an experimental Instagram poet using OpenAI technology to test a human+AI collaboration in art - a thesis currently being explored in an entirely separate trilogy of novels.

Yudhanjaya blogs at Yudhanjaya.com, and has written for Slate, Foreign Policy and more besides.

Reviews

[Chris]

This was an excellent book and a very easy read. If you enjoyed the other books in this series then you will most certainly appreciate this innovative twist on the original first two, it isn't just a bland copy that rides the coattails of the first two after the worldbuilding. In parts this novel reminds me of Heinlein and Haldeman, two classic science fiction authors that I adore. And yet, there is a unique change that gives the story its own peculiar flavor towards the end. I won't spoil it, but it is definitely worth a good read.

If you like stories about ships run by digitized intelligences, Buddhism, and stories of spacefaring mercenaries, then this book is for you!

[Lauren]

My copy clearly needed a proofreader. Had a lot of very basic mistakes. It also almost read like various rough drafts got mushed together, without making sure it all fit together in the final draft. I felt lost for much of this book. I don't know how much was due to poor memory/understanding as I read, lack of clarity in the writing, or unreliable narrator.