The Descendant

For fans of Jack Campbell, Ann Leckie, and John Scalzi, a galaxy-spanning military SF epic where the line between human and machine becomes the key to saving civilization.

Lieutenant Colonel Brian Kidd is a decorated fighter pilot who just wants to lay low after a career-threatening embarrassment. Instead, he catches a dying princess as she tumbles off a stage during an assassination attempt, and his life is never the same.

Princess Rosa Blackburn was born in captivity on a radioactive world, and her body is failing. The Nobility’s best physicians have given up. But Rosa knows about a forbidden AI that could transfer her mind into a synthetic body, if she can reach it before her father, King Lucas, finds out. The king once built an android of himself, and it nearly murdered him. He will destroy anyone who touches that technology again.

Brian helps Rosa make the transition, but when the king discovers what they’ve done, he obliterates their ship, killing Brian’s human body and seemingly ending his daughter forever. Now Brian exists only as an android, hunted by the most powerful man in the galaxy, carrying technology that could either doom humanity or save it from the Bakkui consuming everything in their path.

The forbidden science the king fears most may be the only weapon that can win an unwinnable war, if Brian can survive long enough to prove it.

The Descendant is the fourth book in The Warlord Series.