THE CASUALTY MANIFEST

Admiral Richard Hale built his career on a spreadsheet. It lived on a secure server in the Fleet Logistics Command center on Luna, a mathematical model so comprehensive that it tracked everything from fuel consumption per jump to the average lifespan of communications equipment in combat zones to the psychological attrition rate of enlisted personnel deployed longer than eighteen months in theater.

The model was called the Casualty Efficiency Manifest, and it was Hale's creation. He had developed it over four years while serving as a deputy logistics officer, driven by a simple moral conviction that had been forged in the fires of a failed peacekeeping mission on a frontier colony where he had commanded an infantry battalion. He had seen friends die in actions that his superiors called "tactically unsound but necessary." He had held Lieutenant Vasquez in his arms while Vasquez bled out on the red dirt of a world that didn't appear on any civilian