The Kelvin Protocol
The diagnostic sweep began at 0437 hours, and Ensign Maren Vasquez caught the anomaly before her coffee finished brewing. The Coriolis is a tired ship on a routine patrol, but the signal bleeding through its sensors hasn't been broadcast in decades, and it originates from coordinates that were supposed to have been wiped from every database in the fleet. When the command staff greenlights an unscheduled boarding, the crew has no idea what is waiting inside the silent hull. The derelict is not empty. A protocol activates the moment they cross the threshold, and the rules of the mission begin to change with every deck they descend. Captain Tobias Reeve must hold a fracturing crew together while Lieutenant Sol Khouri fights to keep life support steady. Aurelia Vance, the mission specialist, begins to suspect the signal was never an accident, and that someone on her own ship is listening to the same voices. Idris Halverston, haunted by a black-site operation he survived but never spoke of, recognizes the protocol's signature. The Unidentified Boarder, found unconscious in the derelict's airlock, carries answers in a language the crew can barely translate. And Yara Senne and Linnea Ostrowski, the two communications officers, are the first to hear what the ship is actually trying to say. The deeper they go, the more the protocol rewrites itself around them. One of them will be chosen. One of them will not leave. And the only way to break the cycle is to answer the signal the way it was always meant to be answered, by becoming part of it.