Dead Reckoning

Three weeks after the Kessering Trestle came down, Kade Vasco is a confirmed fire-team lead in a platoon rebuilt out of grief and green replacements. Then the Intelligence Directorate hands 2nd Platoon a mission with his home worlds name on it.

Operation Lodestone is a deep recovery raid onto Tavo, the colony Kade left behind: pull the powered survey core out of the derelict Tavo-Seven relay station and get out. But the ground tells a different story than the briefing. The enemy is not stripping Tavo. They are growing listening lattices along the Coalitions own signal corridors, and every hour the extraction runs loud draws them in. Deep in the Breck mine, on his mothers rationed water and mine air, one hundred seventeen colonists are still alive. And the recovery order has no line on its manifest for a single one of them.

The worst truth is in the archive itself. The Coalition knew, before Tavo-Seven was ever built, that its relay network drew the enemy down these corridors. Someone endorsed the site anyway, and buried the study. Now Kade has to lead soldiers he barely knows through a plan that trades the one thing command actually wants for the lives command never counted, and learn the leaders real arithmetic: which of his people he can bring home, and which he cannot.

Dead Reckoning is the second book in Ironline: a grounded, cost-first military SF novel of a recovery raid on an occupied world, a found unit carrying its dead, and the rot in the chain of command that no clean victory can burn out. Legible tactics, no gore, losses that land, and hope measured in the ones who make it to the ramp.