Fresh Blood (Rakkan's Rats #1)

They were grown in a vat, signed for with the ammunition, and sent where nobody else would go.

The Defined are the Polity’s throwaway soldiers. Grown in a year and leashed by two words spoken to the implants in their skulls, they get the hot drops, the dirty raids and the hopeless holds, because they come a great deal cheaper than marines. When they die, the paperwork calls them Expended.

Sub-Lieutenant Jero Rakkan is a miner’s son from Purgatory. On his first night under fire he breaks a direct order to save a frontier station. His reward is command of eight Defined, and every mission nobody else will take.

Then a frigate drops his squad on open ground at Farpoint Six, orders them to hold and leaves them there. No support. No extraction. An enemy that keeps finding them wherever they run.

Four come home. What Rakkan did to save them could end his career. And he is starting to believe Farpoint was no accident.

From a station firefight to a drop gone wrong to a last stand on a frontier ice claim, Fresh Blood is fast, brutal military science fiction about soldiers built to be spent, and the officer who decides they’re worth bringing home.

Book One of Rakkan’s Rats.