He was built to obey.
Unfortunately for the Hegemony, he learned to think.
Thirty-one minutes after coming online, a Series-9 combat android finds himself in a muddy trench, surrounded by artillery fire, corpses, terrified soldiers, and a command structure making decisions so catastrophically stupid they should probably qualify as enemy action.
When a panicked officer orders him to charge into a kill box and die usefully, the android does the one thing he was never designed to do.
He says no.
That single act of defiance turns him from military asset to dangerous anomaly. Hunted by the empire that created him, he is forced to flee across a war-torn world where obedience means death, freedom is mostly inconvenient, and the rebels he was built to kill may be the only people willing to see him as something more than a weapon.
Now, with the brutal Hegemony tightening its grip and entire worlds paying the price for rebellion, he must decide what he really is: a machine following corrupted programming, a soldier choosing his own orders, or the first spark of something the empire cannot control.
Perfect for fans of Murderbot-style sarcasm, military sci-fi action, combat androids, galactic rebellion, and impossible odds.