Bounty's Stepchild

There are no clocks in the Well, no day or night. If you wake up, you weren't dead yet. On a far-flung planet, men and women pay the penalty for their Earthside crimes. Petty theft or assault, it's all the same, their bodies and minds are forfeit. Used as hosts in a never-ending war against hostile aliens, they are given a cybernetic Assist--an interface that links them to the dead whose personalities, skills, and knowledge have been eternally preserved. Everything that belongs to the prisoners--their bodies, their wills, their thoughts--is subjugated by these Assists. But without them, the prisoners are helpless, unskilled, uneducated cannon fodder on a deadly battlefield. Brian Laris is one of these prisoners. He craves an end to the fighting, the suffering, the war. He has one chance to escape the hell that is the Well, but it comes from a totally unexpected quarter, the Assist in his head.