Space Fleet Academy: Year One

Humanity chose to suffer. The alternative was extinction.

When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. Harsh colony worlds. Brutal selection. Children dying on planets designed to test them. Two centuries later, the Mandate has kept humanity alive, but at a price no one is allowed to question.

Cadet Constantine Ramsey questions it anyway.

As a frontier colonist at Earth's Space Fleet Academy, Constantine keeps flinching at the hard calls, and finds himself being outperformed by the cadets who don't. Then colonies start going dark. Whole worlds, no survivors, no explanation. With senior classes rushed to the frontier, Constantine is thrust onto an unprecedented first-year team at the Inter-Colonial Games, the highest-stakes competition in human space. When catastrophe threatens all four colonies at once, he faces the choice the Academy trained him to make, and makes the one they never expected.

Some officers are made to follow orders. Real leaders are made to give them.