Iron Star Legion

The Concord court-martialed Jory Kade for refusing to fire on a refugee column, took nine years of his life for it, and finished the job by posting him to the Iron Star Legion: the frontier garrison nobody pretends is real, holding the Cinderline, a scatter of scavenged stations the capital prices as a speed bump between two empires. His mech is a two-ton junk-frame called the Rustbucket. His magazine holds two shells. His reactor is a corpse.

Then the corpse wakes up.

Something has been living behind the Rustbucket's crooked weld plate for forty-six years. Shepherd, a founding-era war intelligence the Legion never knew it owned, built to keep a flock that was glassed down to the last child, its memory banks welded shut from the outside. It flies sixty tons of dead iron at ratings no human pilot was ever issued, and it flies them for Jory, and the bill comes out of the frame and out of his hand, nerve by nerve.

The war it remembers never ended. The Concord and the Free Ascendancy have been harvesting the same frontier for two decades, and the proof that they run the war together is sitting in an archive under a glassed world, stamped with Shepherd's own birdcage number. Archon Selene Voss — the woman whose forged order Jory refused, the enemy whose file he went to prison for — is broadcasting that proof one page at a time. Vice Admiral Krey is coming to collapse the jump gate and bury the witness, and the countdown is already running.

Jory's command, such as it is: a chief mechanic with a payroll and no flags. A nineteen-year-old loader learning the trigger. A Legate who keeps a drawer of forty-one citations for pilots the histories were told to forget. And Kestrel — chalk-white ace of the Ascendancy, the pilot Jory captured and could not turn in, whose mother crossed the River Basin column alive. Her squadrons have stopped answering to either empire.

Ninety thousand civilians are camped on the gate apron, inside the admiral's demolition math. The frontier's only ghost mech is down to three legs, one arm, and a voice running out of itself. To stop the closing entry, Jory has to do what no pilot in this war has dared: put the machine that cannot be priced between the fleet and the people, read both governments their own ledger on an open band, and hold long enough for ninety thousand witnesses to become the verdict.

But Shepherd was built for this exact war, and it has never said what it did in the last one. Every rescue spends the frame. Every duel spends Jory. And when the last page is read and the wolves come early, the machine with no orders left makes the only request it has:

Wake the pilot. The wolves are early, the grain is tall, and the roster has a hole in it the shape of the next field.