Soren Vale survived the Red Titan.
Now the silence has spread.
Held aboard an Earth Strategic Coalition cruiser after the first contamination incident, Soren is pulled into a second investigation when a remote mining and refinement outpost in the Kheled Verge stops responding. Its final transmission carried signs of structural corruption, failing systems, and a pattern disturbingly close to what destroyed his former ship.
The station should be cold. Dormant. Contained.
Instead, Soren and the response team find preserved bodies gathered near vents and service grilles, strange ribbed growths threading through machinery, and broken voice-like sounds moving through the outpost's dead systems. The deeper they go, the clearer it becomes that this is no ordinary industrial failure. Something has learned how human infrastructure works. Something has been waiting in the dark.
As institutional caution, political pressure, and rescue protocol collide, one controlled systems restart threatens to turn a silent outpost into an active contamination chain. If the station begins calling ships back to it, the danger will no longer remain sealed inside its walls.
The Silent Outpost is Book 2 of Harbinger Protocol, an atmospheric science-fiction horror saga of biological contamination, failing containment, interstellar political strain, and humanity's first steps towards a crisis it is still trying to name.