Drone Jouster

Nobody volunteers to be a Drone Jouster. You go out ahead of the trench alone. You face what comes with the sun. Most don't survive the week.

Rowen has survived for far longer and he care to know why.

His past was cut from his skull by a Brain-Scraper who couldn't finish the job. Something ancient resisted the blade. All that's left are fragments: a woman's face, a door at 3am, a monster veiled by darkness. He pretends the procedure worked. He goes back to the front and Jousts.

Then a new deployment sends him toward a rumour. Armour of otherworldly design - the Vesper suit - that trades memory for power. Rowen doesn't want the power. He wants the forgetting.

But the suit bonds to him and locks shut, pointing toward its key: a Chrysalis Pod that the Department wants destroyed and a dangerous Lord wants delivered intact. To reach it, Rowen must cross a continent falling apart at the seams - cultists, underground auctions, drone-infested wastelands, and the Babel Cascade, an artificial apocalypse that is consuming the world in real time.

He's been trying to erase his past.

His past refuses to be erased.

75,000 words. Complete. A dark military sci-fi odyssey filled with drones, cults, mysteries, liminal landscapes and horror, a world unlike anything else, and one conscript at the edge of it all.