The Severed Signal

When communications officer Ilse Vancek intercepts a 92-millisecond anomaly on the Meridian Line, she cannot ignore what the whisper of static implies: a transmission that should not exist, routed through a dead woman's archived channel and signed by a fleet admiral with too much to hide. Across the flotilla, signals operative Vera Kestrel is still mourning the sister the Admiral's office claimed was lost to a navigation failure. Yusuf Adekunle and Piotr Zima, two operatives pulled from a closed investigation, are watching the same ghost in the data. Drawn together by a signal someone tried very hard to sever, they begin pulling threads that lead to deep-space maneuvers, falsified logs, and a courier who moves without a name. Every answer surfaces a new question about what Cassius Thorne did beyond the Rim, and what was done to silence the witnesses. As Thorne's agents close ranks and the window to act narrows, the team faces an impossible choice: transmit the reconstructed signal and trigger a confrontation they may not survive, or bury the truth and let the admiral's secret vanish into the void. On the Meridian Line, silence is not peace. It is policy.