The Lie Held
hey told him they were holding the line. Emil Halloran climbed out of the lower blocks the only way his kind is allowed to. He enlisted. Now he holds a defensive belt on a dying colony world, told the same thing every soldier is told: that they're buying civilians time, that the war is turning around out here, that the ground they bleed for matters. He's good at the job. Good enough to notice things. A number stamped on an order that doesn't add up. High ground taken at a terrible cost and handed back on a schedule. A quiet behind the official word that sits wrong in a man who has learned to read quiet. One dead friend at a time, Halloran starts doing a sum in his head he cannot stop doing, and cannot unsee. And he cannot say a word of it, because the men beside him still believe, and their belief is the only thing keeping them alive. Delay Yield is the first book in Hospice for a Species: cold, restrained, and relentless, a war story about the slowest kind of losing, and the men who are never told what they are really holding the line for. What do you fight for once you already know how it ends? For readers of Marko Kloos and Joe Haldeman who like their military science fiction grounded, their soldiers real, and their futures grim.