Kaine's Crucible: Prequel
Om denne e-bog
Cadet Hayden Kaine is twenty-two, top of his Academy class, and heir to one of Earth's most powerful political dynasties. His future is already written: honours, command, and eventually, the presidency.
His final Academy assignment should be simple — observe a routine Confederation peacekeeping operation on the frontier colony of Nova Esperança and come home with a clean report.
He does not come home clean.
Captured by colonial insurgents, Kaine is shown the empire as the frontier sees it: back-breaking labour, a bombed medical facility with children inside, and pacification that looks like extermination. Then he is shown the other side's evidence — sealed, official, forensically perfect — that every atrocity he witnessed was staged.
Is it the truth? Or is it a brilliant psychological operation designed to turn a future president against his own fleet?
"The system doesn't fail us by accident — it works exactly as designed."
What Kaine saw and what the record shows do not match. And the most dangerous thing about a perfect lie isn't that you believe it. It's that you can never be certain of the truth again.
What you will find inside:
A young officer forced to question everything he was raised to serve
Colonial insurgency versus peacekeeping — where the truth is the first casualty
Moral complexity with kinetic military action
The origin of Hayden Kaine, eleven days before everything changes
A complete story — no cliffhanger
For readers of Ender's Game who want the moral weight to cut deeper.
Kaine's Crucible is a standalone prequel novella — the entry point to the Shattered Empire series.
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Om forfatteren
D.M. Pruden writes big‑canvas space opera with military stakes, political intrigue, and technology that always comes with a price.
A Canadian author with a taste for “what if we actually had to live with this?”, he builds interconnected universes in which collapsed FTL networks, ancient alien artefacts, security‑state AIs, and covert missions collide with very human loyalties and failures. His stories often sit at the crossroads of space opera, military SF, and political SF, circling questions of power, justice, and what makes a civilisation worth saving.
D.M. Pruden is best known for the Shattered Empire saga, the near‑future Destin Chronicles, and standalones like Sovereigns of Ruin set in the same wider universe. If you enjoy authors such as Peter F. Hamilton, C.J. Cherryh, or Dan Simmons, his work is aimed squarely at you.
