Iron Shell Protocol

The army measures burial shrouds for Consumable pilots in advance, because afterward there is never time. Casper Lin is the cheapest piece of the war: a depot kid flying Iron Shell, a rusted pre-war mech the brass wrote off decades ago, dropped into the Kestrel Basin to die loudly enough that real soldiers can follow the tracer fire in. Then his pod's dead board blazes green, and something sealed in the chassis wakes up and makes him an offer. Wren can see every enemy shot one and a half seconds before it fires. The price is Casper's own mind, burned as fuel one memory at a time. The first payment is his sister's laugh - the last real thing he had of Mara - and the ledger has only just opened.

One impossible battle later, the front has a legend and Casper has a name he never asked for: the Gravekeeper of the Quiet Zone. Then the sky itself goes to war. The Long Night falls - nine days in which every networked gun, drone veil, and satellite on the front goes blind at once, and only iron sights and nerve are left. The 13th Special Armor holds the dark. The legend grows teeth. And the people who built the night come to collect it: Directorate Nine, the office that needs the Long Night to fall because its budget depends on the falling, and Adrian Kohl, its dying architect, a man who has spent thirty years pricing one question - what will a pilot volunteer when everything else is taken?

Wren, it turns out, is one of twelve sibling minds the old program hatched and the army tried to bury, and her miracles run on a counter Casper cannot see: keys turning somewhere behind his eyes, three, four, five, the sixth key living in his own head. Kohl commands forty stolen sibling chassis and calls them his aviary. Across the lines waits the Chorus, the enemy's cathedral war mind, carrying the voices of eleven dead pilots and six years of sabotage in its veins - sabotage planted by a dock worker whose name Casper will not learn until he is standing inside the enemy's own house, because the saboteur is his father. And the manifest of a captured freighter lists names the war declared dead: Casper's mother and sister, shelved alive in the enemy's warehouse for a year.

Now Kohl takes the calibration array up to orbit with three cradles and a cipher that can burn any of the twelve out of existence, and dares the alliance to climb and stop him. To follow, Casper must fly a gun with no manual into orbital dark, hold the hand of an enemy machine that buys everything and has forgotten what it bought, and face an escrow that offers to hand back every memory he ever burned - at a price collected from exactly one man, payable only by a volunteer. The Second Long Night is falling over the planet. The war wants its key.

Casper Lin has spent the whole book paying on schedule. This time he means to take the pot.