High octane SF adventure with Smith's trademark twist - Jamie Sawyer In FRIENDLY FIRE, the Bastard Legion are hired to pull off a daring power-armoured heist of propriety tech. Getting the tech will be hard. Getting off the planet, deadly. Four hundred years in the future, the most dangerous criminals are kept in suspended animation aboard prison ships and "rehabilitated" in a shared virtual reality environment. But Miska Storrow, a thief and hacker with a background in black ops, has stolen one of these ships, the Hangman's Daughter, and made it her own. Controlled by explosive collars and trained in virtual reality by the electronic ghost of a dead marine sergeant, the thieves, gangsters, murderers, and worse are transformed into Miska's own private indentured army: the Bastard Legion.