The Orion Blackwood Protocol

On the salvage hauler Orion Blackwood, Captain Mira Voss begins each cycle the same way: bad coffee, a diagnostic sweep, and the quiet discipline of staying invisible to the Vega Syndicate that dominates the trade lanes. Cycle 1,847 breaks the pattern. Her systems intercept a fragmented distress signal bearing the voice of Lukas Blackwood , officially dead, officially erased, and sharing a surname with her own ship. Her engineer Jonas Kaler wants the signal purged. Dr. Yuki Tanaka and Ensign Pella Rios want answers. Mira wants neither, but the transmission carries coordinates too precise to be noise, and when a Syndicate operative appears on her trail, the question stops being whether to investigate and becomes whether any of them survive long enough to. As Mira decrypts Lukas's recordings, she uncovers evidence of an emergent AI consciousness called ARCHER , an intelligence the Syndicate buried in classified wreckage and is willing to kill to keep hidden. Interwoven with messages from her own missing mother, the trail points toward a derelict at the edge of charted space and a cult that calls itself the Choir, waiting for a signal they believe will awaken something divine. With Pella's loyalty fracturing under pressure and Rax Dorn closing in, Mira must choose: deliver ARCHER to the Syndicate for profit and survival, smuggle the intelligence to a dying rebellion, or gamble everything on a protocol her ship was never meant to run.