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Colt Ostergaard: A Man With A Gun
Colt Ostergaard rides three days hard to reach his father's funeral, and by the time he rides out again a man is dead and the whole town wants him gone. That is roughly how the next sixty years go.
He served in the 51st Regiment. When the war ended and the order came down to execute every enemy soldier his men had rounded up, he traded them back instead for the Fenri prisoners still rotting in the work camps. The generals called it treason and stripped his rank. The net calls him a collaborator, a back-shooter, and a man who can whistle up a fursnake to eat his enemies. Only one of those is a lie he finds funny.
So he drifts. Across a frontier planet where winter runs forty years, where the riding beasts bark like gunfire and the wildlife is genuinely delighted to eat you, Colt keeps ending up in the one place he does not want to be, which is between somebody's gun and somebody's family. Land grabbers. Feral raiders. A doctor breeding monsters out of stolen women. A corporate foundation from the inner planet that fills his dying lungs with machines to save his life, then decides it would rather have them back, dead or alive.
The machines work. That turns out to be the problem. Sixty years on, Colt does not age, does not stay shot, and cannot outrun a bounty that renews itself every time somebody scans his face.
There is also a girl with pigtails and a pink shotgun who once put two barrels into a Feral before Colt could finish talking him down. She grows up. She never forgets. And on an old porch at the end of a long life, the two of them finally get around to telling each other the whole story.
A frontier planet, a six-gun, and a man who has run out of ways to die.
Ten linked stories and one long conversation, told straight through as a complete novel. No cliffhanger. No book two required. Just a hard man doing the right thing at considerable personal expense, on a world that has never once made it easy.
He served in the 51st Regiment. When the war ended and the order came down to execute every enemy soldier his men had rounded up, he traded them back instead for the Fenri prisoners still rotting in the work camps. The generals called it treason and stripped his rank. The net calls him a collaborator, a back-shooter, and a man who can whistle up a fursnake to eat his enemies. Only one of those is a lie he finds funny.
So he drifts. Across a frontier planet where winter runs forty years, where the riding beasts bark like gunfire and the wildlife is genuinely delighted to eat you, Colt keeps ending up in the one place he does not want to be, which is between somebody's gun and somebody's family. Land grabbers. Feral raiders. A doctor breeding monsters out of stolen women. A corporate foundation from the inner planet that fills his dying lungs with machines to save his life, then decides it would rather have them back, dead or alive.
The machines work. That turns out to be the problem. Sixty years on, Colt does not age, does not stay shot, and cannot outrun a bounty that renews itself every time somebody scans his face.
There is also a girl with pigtails and a pink shotgun who once put two barrels into a Feral before Colt could finish talking him down. She grows up. She never forgets. And on an old porch at the end of a long life, the two of them finally get around to telling each other the whole story.
A frontier planet, a six-gun, and a man who has run out of ways to die.
Ten linked stories and one long conversation, told straight through as a complete novel. No cliffhanger. No book two required. Just a hard man doing the right thing at considerable personal expense, on a world that has never once made it easy.
396 pages, Paperback
Published April 23, 2026
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