An Apple for the Legion (Paperback or Softback)

From the world of A Kiss for Damocles, winner of the 2026 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

Third Decanus Kaur was engineered for this.

The Mutual Prosperity builds its legionaries from the genes of heroes, and Kaur carries the face of Tanveer Kaur, whose sacrifice in the Spring Thunder Campaign helped pull humanity back from extinction. She has trained since birth to liberate the enslaved worlds of the Terran Commonwealth. She has memorized the Social Virtues. She has disciplined every doubt she ever had.

Then she lands on Hesperides Colony, and the liberation refuses to go as planned.

The colonists fight like people with something to protect. Bony old librarians throw books at her. And one of those books is a biography of her own mother, in her mother's own unedited words, which do not match anything the Prosperity taught her daughter. Her commander tells her to read it. That is when the headaches begin.

Then the volcano erupts.

Cut off from Fleet, with no resupply and no evacuation, Kaur is twenty-three years old and commands ten legionaries on a dying world buried in ash. The orders coming down grow more monstrous by the hour. And the one man who has spent years teaching her what it means to honor her heritage is running out of time to finish the lesson.

An Apple for the Legion is a military science fiction novella told from the wrong side of the invasion: precise, dark, and hard to put down. It is the story of how the Long Night began, and of one soldier deciding what her mother would think.

It stands alone and can be read before or after the novels. It takes place five centuries before A Kiss for Damocles: Book 1 of Shai.

The Long Night is coming. This is how it starts.