Conscript: Terranova

Jack Calloway is seventeen, a scavenger from the outer rings of New Chicago, a colony city built around a Kryllium mining operation on the moon Terranova. His parents are dead. His brother Marcus is listed MIA after the destruction of the forward base where he was stationed, and the official record has been closed in a way that tells Jack everything he needs to know about what the institution thinks of the people it loses. Six weeks before the military draft catches him, Jack crosses a cordon into the ruins of that base looking for something of his brother’s to bring home. He finds nothing of Marcus. He finds the device instead, a featureless metallic band sitting pristine in the wreckage, which liquefies on contact and absorbs into his skin without pain or trace. It is Ace, an ancient biomechanical symbiotic system of unknown origin that has been dormant in the rubble since before the current conflict began, and it has chosen Jack according to criteria that have nothing to do with genetics or status and everything to do with character. It does not announce itself. It begins, quietly, to change him. Conscripted into the Colonial Defense Force, Jack enters a war he did not choose, fighting for a government he does not trust against the Vorthak, an insectoid warrior species waging a restricted campaign on behalf of a vast interstellar empire whose full nature remains unknown to most of humanity. Two conscript species pointed at each other by a power that owns neither of them. Across the campaign Jack conceals Ace, conceals his private search for his brother in every piece of captured intelligence that crosses his path, and becomes something the military cannot account for. When Terranova becomes the first colony to successfully push the Vorthak back, Jack finds Marcus’s name on a prisoner of war manifest recovered from captured Vorthak infrastructure. Alive. Flagged for a purpose Jack does not yet have the context to interpret. The war has not ended. It has revealed itself. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Conscript: Terranova — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠