Brooks Hammer

Mac Mackenzie is fifty-eight years old with a titanium knee and a tremor in his left hand. He is also the only pilot alive who can thread a spacecraft through an orbital debris field without a computer.When a catastrophic collision threatens to make low Earth orbit permanently uninhabitable, Mac is pulled out of retirement for one final mission. But the debris field isn't random. Someone built it. And they're watching to see if anyone is good enough to fly through it.Black Sky is the explosive opening of the Brooks Hammer universe - a twenty-book near-future military thriller series spanning six eras of human conflict and technological warfare.Book 1 of 20. The war starts here.

The immersion tanks at Groom Lake were built to keep hypersonic pilots alive through thermal loads that melt titanium. Jax Jagger enters the mesosphere one last time to intercept TIAN-2, knowing the airframe will hold but the pilot probably will not. His neural degradation is accelerating. The tremor spreading from his hand into his cognition, the boundary between Jax and the aircraft dissolving with each flight. His daughter Lily asks him not to go. He goes anyway. The SCORCH aircraft was designed for a pilot who could merge with the machine at the cost of everything that made him human. Jax flies into the upper atmosphere and does not come back as the man who left. The merge is permanent. What emerges refuses lethal force, refuses to be a weapon, and refuses to die on anyone's terms but its own. Book six closes the hypersonic era with a price no flight manual covers.