Battle simulation was never the clean, sterile science they taught at the academy. A machine could crunch numbers, but it could never account for the ugliest constant in war: the terrified, fallible, gloriously stupid human being inside the cockpit.

  Jack knew the schools of thought. The micromanagers, who tried to script every motion until battle looked like a chessboard, were useful only in training exercises. The statisticians, who worshipped probability curves. And the mainstream commanders of High Command, who believed the answer to any unpredictable event was more men, more metal, more fire.

  Fools. All of them. They were solving a chess problem while the real game was a knife fight in an alley.

  In Thor’s cramped cockpit, Jack practiced a dirtier art. His Cognitive Battlefield Model didn’t just simulate mechs; it simulated the people inside them. Using fragments of data stolen from the labs—battle records, comms transcripts, even personal histories—he built psychological profiles of Imperial commanders. Fear, vanity, hunger for status. He fed those flaws into the system, turning weakness into variables.

  This was what he had done in the Crucible, as Loki. He hadn’t outflown his opponents. He had out-thought them, tricked them into traps born from their own egos. Now he was trying to run the same gambit on a planetary scale.

  Every simulation he ran—hundreds of them, then thousands—ended the same way. The Commonwealth advance collapsed into an ambush, whole brigades swallowed in fire. It wasn’t a hunch. It wasn’t even a guess. It was inevitable.

  But who would believe him? He was a disgraced mechanic turned Lieutenant. To tell the generals their grand offensive would fail because one Imperial officer was vain, another addicted to gambling, another terrified of being seen as weak—it would get him laughed out of the room, maybe shot.

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  Hours stretched into a day. Sweat streaked the comms specialist’s face as he climbed down from the Stinger.

  “Still nothing, Lieutenant,” he reported. “Captain Rashid’s signal is gone. Completely.”

  Jack swore under his breath. Of all the times for things to go right, this wasn’t one of them. Without Rashid’s secure channel as a relay, any direct signal to High Command would light them up for every Imperial sensor in range.

  “Keep trying,” Jack ordered. He heard how irrational it sounded. “No matter what, get me that connection. I don’t care how.”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier answered, snapping a salute. But Jack caught the flicker in his eyes, the set of his jaw as he turned away to whisper with his crewmate. Jack didn’t need a model to know what he was thinking: This new Lieutenant is losing it. He thinks he’s smarter than all of High Command. He’ll get us killed.

  Jack’s smile was bitter and private. He couldn’t even blame them. If he were in their boots, he’d think the same thing. To gamble hundreds of lives on an unproven model—if he was right, he’d be a hero. If he were wrong, he’d be a butcher.

  And my life is worth more than a gut feeling, a cold inner voice whispered back.

  On the maps, the Commonwealth columns continued to advance. The jaws hadn’t closed yet. He told himself there was still time.

  Another day passed. Rashid’s silence now felt like a death knell. In the tunnels, the air grew heavy, every conversation strained. Jack’s models showed the vanguard stretched thin, exactly where the Imperials wanted them. The “retreat” was folding, their wings beginning to pivot, ready to snap shut.

  Jack’s hands shook on the armrests. He wanted to take the Stinger, punch through the surface, and broadcast the warning to the whole system. Damn the cost. Damn the risk. But the survivor’s voice stopped him: And what if you’re wrong? What if you just threw these hundred men and the two women who trust you into the furnace for nothing?

  The question hollowed him. Was he wrong? Was all this just paranoia dressed in numbers?

  He sat in the cockpit, paralyzed. The hell wasn’t outside. It was inside him—between the lives of the few he swore to protect, and the tens of thousands walking into slaughter.

  “Jack?”

  The voice broke through the spiral of thought.

  He looked up. Meadow stood there, steady and gentle, her eyes searching his face. She didn’t call him Lieutenant. She didn’t call him sir. She just said his name.

  “Can I ask you something?”