The Cinder Protocol
The UES Alcyone came home on a glide path that should have killed her, and the seven souls aboard are the only reason she ever reached Meridian Station's docking corridor at all. Journalist Joren Hayes watches from the press gallery as the rust-orange frigate wrestles the magnetic guides, condensate freezing into silver threads against the black, the bow still scarred by whatever hot thing kissed it. Behind the commercial ring's glass, seven people are waiting with very different agendas. Vex Kalloran carries the Cinder Protocol in its most lethal form: a dead drop that, if activated, will burn the diplomatic truce between seven worlds to cinder. Yara Solenne knows which of the crew are still breathing on the Alcyone's wounded decks and which are already ghosts. Ghelen Vost owes the station a debt he can't collect. Mirelle Tano, Rian Dosh, and Aldric Venn each hold a fragment of the mission that went wrong, and none of them trust the others enough to hand theirs over. The frigate docks. The press doors open. And the protocol starts its countdown. What follows is a tight, breathless rotation through seven perspectives as loyalties fracture, the station's political ring tightens like a noose, and the cinder at the core of the Alcyone's hull threatens to go cold, or detonate. Joren has hours before the story runs and every faction goes to war for the narrative. Vex has less than that before the Protocol executes. And Yara has already decided which crew member she'll leave in the airlock to buy the others time. No one on Meridian Station gets to be the one who stays whole. The question is who burns last.