About this ebook
Three days into an embed at Perdition's Ridge, she's sat by a heat-lamp with the squad she's been sent to turn into a headline — and one soldier has already asked her the only question that matters: do you believe what you write, or do you just believe it's necessary?
Then the offensive goes over the top on a timeline written in New Arcadia, not on the battlefield. A targeting window gets keyed to a camera position instead of a ground report. A sergeant dies pulling two men clear of a collapse that was never supposed to happen — and the Ministry of Common Cause needs a hero, not a casualty report, before an Assembly vote in nineteen days.
So they build one. Out of the man who lived.
Aria knows exactly how the machine works — she's spent two years running it. What she doesn't know yet is what it costs to stop, or who else has spent eleven years quietly keeping the truth alive in a locked drawer, waiting for someone willing to use it.
The Hero Quota is a satirical, blood-and-propaganda military science fiction novel about the war behind the war — the one fought in newsrooms, quota memos, and the space between what a soldier actually did and what the broadcast needed her to have done.
