Hollow Zero

On patrol through the rust-and-violet murk of a dying nebula, signal officer Kael Voss expects the same empty shift he's run a hundred times , eyes on the audit cascade, coffee cooling at his elbow, the cruiser Vast Relic slipping through the Quiet Lattice like a ghost. Then a single anomalous reading surfaces in the data, and the boredom cracks open into something far worse. The signal he's stumbled onto has been deliberately scrubbed from command's records , a buried truth that Admiral Cassius Wren's fleet has spent years erasing. As Kael digs deeper, he draws the attention of Commander Elise Vane, whose quiet loyalties are harder to read than the nebula outside. Maren Dusk and Jarek Sol become unlikely allies; Dr. Yuki Tanaka offers cold equations that suggest something impossible is moving through the lattice; and Thessaly Okafor seems to know more than anyone is willing to say. At the center of it all waits Sera Voss, Kael's sister, whose own silence may be the most dangerous piece of the puzzle. With the cruiser's transmissions monitored and every audit flagged, Kael must choose: surface the truth and risk everything , including Sera , or let the void at the heart of the lattice keep swallowing ships whole. Hollow Zero is counting down. The only question is who reaches zero first.