Having spent 12 years floating in orbital debris, a Terran soldier’s cryo-pod crash-lands on a world her fleet was sent to attack. Marooned and alone, Andara Rax finds herself on an alien planet where the ashes of her comrades rain down as deadly bullet-hail. A continuous, self-sustaining EMP has crippled the enemy, and is also preventing her attempts to send a rescue signal.

A native, Pel, tells her his people — the Kashabi — are not the enemy, and a mysterious race known as the Cresari may be behind a deception encompassing her world and his. With no way to get a signal home or learn what destroyed her fleet, Andara’s only option is to make a perilous journey across continually-bombarded terrain to shut off the EMP. In her shielded battle-skin she’s the only one who can, but should she?

In order to learn the truth, she bands together with Pel and his crew of scrappers who eke a living salvaging technology fallen from the mysteriously destroyed Terran fleet. Along the way, circumstances lead her to question whether the Kashabi were ever a threat and what that means for her — a soldier who came to destroy them.

Raindrops From Terra is the story of Andara Rax and the decisions she makes when faced with an impossible choice: switch off the EMP so she can call for rescue, thereby restoring the Kashabi’s ability to threaten her world; or keep them crippled, stranding herself on their world forever.

Chapter 1: Awakening

Terran marine Andara Rax’s drumbeat heart resonated through the graphene-coated polymers of her armoured battle-skin. This was it: the moment humanity finally struck back against the alien menace that had razed the outer colonies.

The gentle voice of her AI feathered through her mind. “You gonna miss this place?”

Andara took a final look through the deployment carrier’s viewport where Terra’s all-encompassing industrial sprawl lay grey beneath the clouds. She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Shelby was more than a neural implant, and Andara knew her AI was well aware of the desolation that had spurred her to enlist.

Terra was a world of thirty billion in a confederacy of seventeen planets. Countless tiny, perishable humans, dispersed across the galactic spiral, and among them Andara was alone ...