Commander Valerius Thorne is the Hegemony's greatest naval strategist. A mind sharpened by logic, tactics, and cold calculus. He fights with vector mathematics and fleet logistics, not desperate scrambles in the dark.

But strategy requires a board, and Thorne has just been swept off the table.

The transport vessel Icarus has crashed on a dead, obsidian world. The reactor is bleeding radiation. The air scrubbers are pumping toxins. And the crew isn't just dead.

A bio-digital plague known as the Chimera Protocol has breached containment. It doesn't just kill; it upgrades. It fuses necrotic flesh with high-tensile steel, turning engineers into hunter-killer drones.

Thorne wakes up broken, bleeding, and chemically destabilized. He has a shattered femur, one magazine of ammunition, and a terrifying realization:

The crash wasn’t an accident. It was a stress test.

The Corporation didn't send him here to save the ship. They sent him to see if their new biological weapon could kill the Hegemony’s best tactician. To survive, he must descend into the dying ship to face Asset 9—a genetic doppelgänger designed to replace him.

As hypoxia sets in, Thorne is joined by Miller—a cynical, chain-smoking hallucination of his dead best friend. Miller whispers cruel truths and forces Thorne to accept a brutal reality: You cannot think your way out of this. You have to bleed your way out.

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Echoes of Icarus is Book 0—the visceral Survival Horror prequel to the Sovereign Algorithm series.

While this story explores the trauma that broke the man, the main series (Book 1+) evolves into a Hard Sci-Fi LitRPG & Grand Strategy epic. Three centuries later, Thorne will wake up to conquer the Fractured Rim using the WAR-NET System—an interface that turns galactic war into a Real-Time Strategy game.

Read the origin story today. Witness the trauma that created the tactic.