The Proxy War: A Hard Science Fiction Space Fleet Thriller (The Vanguard Calculus)

HE CAN'T HEAR HIS OWN SHIP DYING. HE CAN STILL DO THE MATH.

The blast at Torus Prime took Commander Elias Thorne's hearing, his rank, and most of the people he was supposed to bring home. The tribunal filed the rest under acceptable losses.

Then he decrypted the order behind it. Torus Prime wasn't an ambush that went wrong. It was a cull that went exactly right.

Thorne limps the crippled Aegis into Erebus Anchorage, a hollowed-out asteroid where the only currency is leverage. Eight survivors. One burn left in a reactor that's already cooking itself. No rank left to lose.

What he finds there is a Vanguard logistics broker with Syndicate killers on his heels and a datachip he can't sell.

The chip holds the whole arithmetic.

Casualty projections agreed in advance. Battles booked out by the fiscal quarter. Losses timed to solar storm windows, margins locked, the dead entered as a line item both boards had already initialed. The Vanguard and the Solarian Syndicate aren't fighting a war.

They're running one. Together. For the margin.

Leaking it changes nothing; the algorithm buries proof under deepfakes inside a week. So Thorne picks the one place the lie can't be spun: Point Sedna, where both fleets converge unescorted, once, to trade loss tables face to face.

He'll ride a dead frigate into the middle of the summit, weld a scavenged analog repeater onto a dreadnought's comms spine, and drop the unredacted truth on every hull inside one light-second.

There is no digital attack vector. That's exactly why it works. It isn't a hack. It's a megaphone against a microphone.

The margin for detection is four seconds. Thorne has run every number twice.

He hasn't told the crew what the arithmetic costs.

The Proxy War is a full-length, 85,000-word novel and the second book in The Vanguard Calculus series: hard military science fiction built on analog engineering, logistics as a weapon, and a crew held together by grease, spite, and margin. For readers who devour the fleet tactics of Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet, the chain-of-command grit of David Weber's Honor Harrington, and the survival math of Andy Weir.

Scroll up, buy now or read free in Kindle Unlimited, and find out what the truth costs.