Iron Meridian

On the rim of Mare Tranquillitatis, Luna Command hums with the quiet tension of a base that has buried too many secrets. Major Elias Trent arrives aboard the Prometheus expecting a standard rotation , instead, he finds his brother Marcus standing inside a sealed quarantine lock, a defector from the outer colonies carrying encrypted coordinates to something designated only as the Iron Meridian. As Elias weighs the uniform he swore to serve against the family he swore to protect, the station's garrison tightens around them: Colonel Hollis Kane demands Marcus be surrendered for interrogation, operative Yara Solbeg begins tracing the leak through every crew manifest, and intelligence officer Cassius Volk steps off a shuttle with a sealed order that could change the meaning of the word meridian forever. Mira Voss holds the only decryption key. Orin Beck has quietly assembled a kill team on the docking ring. Ines Marcano monitors transmissions that someone is already silencing, and Sable Renner, Petra Almasi, and Lira each carry fragments of a truth the chain of command will kill to bury. When Tomas Ashby , the civilian consultant who helped design Iron Meridian , is found dead in the shadow of the observation deck, the mission stops being a transfer and becomes a countdown. Elias must decide whether to shield his brother's betrayal, expose Luna Command's complicity, or follow the coordinates into the one place no officer has ever returned from. The meridian has been crossed. The iron is already cold.