The Ember Protocol

On a world where the sky is the color of a wound and the dust storms never stop, Captain Kira Thellon holds a crumbling garrison against forces she's no longer sure are the enemy. Seven years on Cygnus-IV have stripped Forward Garrison 19 to its bones. The evacuation order from month four never came. The reinforcements from month six were a fiction. Now the violet storms are accelerating past every model, and the basalt shelf is fracturing. Then the Ember Protocol surfaces. Buried in classified archives beneath the garrison, the Protocol was never a defense. It's an erasure, a controlled thermal cascade that would glass the planet's surface, sever all off-world communication, and kill Cygnus-IV so the data it holds can be controlled. Sergeant Dax Ironside built the Protocol's physical housing and knows the human cost. Lieutenant Maren Cole has been feeding intelligence to an off-world faction through Director Oren Beck's channels and sees it as a way out. Pilot Jax Ardent, the only one who can thread a transport through the storm wall, is compromised. And the unnamed young woman pulled from the storm three days ago, claimed to be Mara Thellon's daughter, is the key to who authorized the Protocol. When the storm crests the parapet and the math says seventy-two hours, Thellon faces the choice: activate the erasure and guarantee control of the data, or let the glass plains take everything and pray the evacuation window that never came is finally real. The storm doesn't care about the answer. It just keeps moving.