Raven's Head(A Chronicle of the Pirates of the 24th Century)Book Five of the History of Piracy in the 24th CenturyBy the middle decades of the twenty-fourth century, few figures altered the political map of the Sigma Draconis region as completely as the pirate and revolutionary later known simply as 49. Her campaigns, alliances, and eventual seizure of system-level authority overturned long-standing corporate arrangements and reshaped the labor economy of multiple frontier colonies. Historians often trace these upheavals to her years of command, but the foundations of her rise were laid much earlier-during her first, uneasy postings as a security cadet.Raven's Head belongs to this earliest period. Before the raids, before the mutinies, before her name circulated in corporate threat briefings, she was one of many numbered recruits assigned to bleak outer installations meant to absorb the wasted youth of the colonies. The stations were under-funded, the oversight inconsistent, and the work dangerous in ways that official reports never acknowledged. It was here that 349-still anonymous, still buried in the bureaucratic lattice of training rotations-learned how authority functioned at the bottom of the corporate frontier.These months at Raven's Head introduced her to the miners and contract workers whose grievances would later fuel her revolt. They also placed her under officers whose cruelty, neglect, and corruption formed her earliest lessons about institutional power. The habits she developed here-watchfulness, distrust of senior ranks, and a quiet willingness to intervene when no one else would-appear in later records of her actions across Sigma Draconis.This volume presents that formative assignment in full. It is not yet the story of a commander or a popular leader. It is the record of a young security officer observing the edges of a system she would one day dismantle. Readers familiar with later histories will recognize the origins of her tactics and loyalties in these pages, alongside the first hints of the resolve that shaped the political realignments of the region.Raven's Head is the fourth entry in the History of Pirates in the 24th Century series. It documents the beginning of the trajectory that would eventually carry 349 out of the anonymity of her number and into the central conflicts of her age. (This book contains limited sexually explicit language)