The Thornwood Protocol
Felix Thornwood wakes from cryosleep to a sound no mission briefing ever prepared him for: a single, cycling ping echoing through the dark of a ship that should be full of crew but isn't. Frost clings to his lashes. The cryogel still hugs his ribs. And Ghost, the combat AI threaded into his nervous system, is the only voice that answers. The ship's logs tell a different story than the empty corridors, someone has rewritten the mission, scrubbed manifests, and aimed the vessel at a coordinate buried so deep in classified memory that even Ghost can't explain it. As Felix pieces together what happened during his frozen sleep, Chief Engineer Ramos guards locked compartments, Cadet Mira Vance insists the crew was taken, not lost, and the Shepherd's quiet protocols begin threading through systems that should be dead. Each answer Felix uncovers splits the survivors into factions, and every system he trusts, Ghost, the Cartographer, the merged intelligence calling itself Atlas, offers a version of the truth that contradicts the last. With the ship bleeding atmosphere and a hostile signal closing on their position, Felix must choose: follow the protocol that promises to bring the missing crew home, or trust the ghosts in the drift who say the protocol is what killed them. The only way out is through the dark. The only way through is to wake whatever is waiting on the other side.