Earth's most elite space force.
Perfectly trained. Completely expendable. Endlessly reusable.
In a world where recruits disappear and assets return, humanity is measured in memories kept. Jack Rourke has nothing left in his dying rust-belt town except a fractured family and a future going nowhere.
When a mysterious government program offers escape, he takes it—only to discover he's not being trained, but transformed.
Stripped of his name, assigned a number, and subjected to brutal conditioning on an orbital station, Jack realizes this isn't military recruitment—it's human processing.
As the system methodically erases his identity, Jack forms an alliance with fellow recruit Connor, preserving fragments of themselves through whispered memories in the dark.
But when the final test comes—a deadly seven-day survival gauntlet on an airless asteroid—Jack must decide: become the perfect asset they demand, or hold onto the humanity they're determined to erase.
Some soldiers are made. Others are unmade.
Void Soldier by Logan Shields
In a time when Earth's landscapes have crumbled under the weight of neglect, those left behind cling to the edge of despair. Jack Rourke emerges from one such place, a rust-belt town where echoes of former lives linger in the air and hope has become a distant memory. He possesses only the fragments of a fractured family and a life that drifts aimlessly toward oblivion. The government recruits young men and women, promising a chance at a brighter future, yet these offers come with hidden costs.
When Jack takes the opportunity to join a program he does not fully understand, he steps into a world stripped of individuality. Within the sterile confines of an orbital training station, recruits become mere numbers, their pasts erased by the relentless machine of military ambition. Each moment on the station is a fight against the mechanism designed to mold them into perfect soldiers, devoid of emotion, driven only by obedience and efficiency.
Within this system, Jack discovers a kindred spirit in Connor, another recruit desperately holding onto memories that the program seeks to obliterate. Their whispers in the darkness become a lifeline, an anchor against the storm of transformation they face. But as the gauntlet approaches—an unforgiving test that requires total submission to the forces stripping away their identities—Jack must confront his reality.
Every choice becomes a conflict between survival and the instinct to retain his humanity, a tension that rises with each passing day. In the military's ruthless vision, some soldiers are crafted from the raw material of men, while others are reduced to whispers of who they once were.
Book Hooks is a weekly cooperative blog hop hosted by members of Marketing for Romance Writers as part of the MFRW Authors Blog.
