The Seventy-First Day
Two hundred exhausted drop troopers. Eleven thousand colonists who cannot be evacuated. And a lieutenant who is only in command because everyone senior is dead.
Lieutenant Sabine Orrick has been an officer for fourteen months. On the first day of the siege of Cadence Bight she inherits the Ninth Company because a single artillery mission on the Ridgeline road killed every officer above her. She is twenty-six years old. She has two hundred and four soldiers, one town in a bowl of grey rock, a cratered shuttle field, and food for one hundred and six days.
The Ashet Concordat does not want to destroy Cadence Bight. They want it whole - the water plant running, the extraction galleries dry - which is the only leverage Orrick has and the only thing standing between eleven thousand civilians and the end of everything. Across the ridge, Field-Warden Ilesa Ronveq has twenty years of command, a full siege train, and one instruction: take the town working.
For seventy-one days, the fight is not for corridors or ground. It is for water, sleep, bread, and belief. And every message that promises relief comes from a transmitter that has not moved in five and a half weeks.
WHAT'S INSIDE
- A siege told in phases, day by day: dig in, ration, hold the water plant, endure the bombardment, make the choice
- Three points of view - an accidental lieutenant, a colony administrator who keeps her ledger in ink, and an enemy officer doing her own brutal arithmetic
- Command as it actually works: rotas, ration announcements, hunger discipline, morale, a sealed four-day reserve in every hand
- Civilians at the centre of the story, treated soberly and never as spectacle
- A negotiation scene six hours and forty minutes long that is more tense than any firefight
- Entirely invented factions, worlds and technology - no real nation, service or weapon appears
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
