For fans of John Scalzi, Jack Campbell, and character-driven military science fiction where the cost of war is measured in more than casualties.
Navigator Logan Gilbert is two weeks from earning his pilot’s wings when a sabotaged ejection seat forces an impossible choice. He saves his partner’s life — and loses his right arm, his face, and nearly everything else in the fire that follows.
Burned beyond recognition, the doctors piece him back together with an experimental brain patch. It keeps his heart beating and accelerates his recovery. But it also does something it lets him fly a spacecraft with his mind.
The military revokes his pilot slot anyway.
As humanity’s war against the alien Lithics collapses on every front, Logan is handed the controls of the Sled, the most dangerous weapon ever built. A fighter that doesn't just respond to its pilot. It thinks with him. Fights with him. And slowly, mission by mission, burns through him like a fuse.
Each flight costs him something he can't get back. A memory. A name. A face he used to know.
The surgeon who rebuilt him, who fell in love with him, married him, and keeps stitching him back together, watches it happen in real time, powerless to stop a man who would rather die flying than live grounded.
He survived fire and sacrifice once. The question isn't whether he'll face them again. It's how much of him will be left when it's over.
