Ground Truth

Kade Vasco enlisted because there was nothing left on Tavo to stay for. The Coalition took his family's water for a relay station, an alien Thresher strike put smoke on the horizon, and the recruiting feeds promised a war that was being won. The recruiting feeds lied. What the Line Corps hands him instead is a training sergeant with no patience for heroes, a lieutenant who still believes the mission briefings, and a squad of strangers he has no intention of needing. Then they drop onto Hadley, into a corridor the Coalition swears is stable, and Kade learns the ground truth of this war in a single afternoon of noise and blood: the line is collapsing, the casualty numbers are a fiction, and the colonel above them will spend every soldier he has for a mark on a map. When the officers start trading lives for lies, the plan does not survive contact and the people who wrote it are not the ones who die for it. Holding a length of the Ironline means holding it with the ones who are left, and it falls to Kade, a loner who never wanted anyone to lose, to decide what the line is actually worth, and who crosses the bridge, and who covers. Ground Truth is the first book of Ironline, a grounded, cost-first military science fiction series for readers who want their squads real, their combat legible, and their soldiers worth caring about before the war spends them. No chosen ones. No clean victories. Just the line, and the people holding it.