Starship Commanders: The Centauri Signal

SOMEONE SENT A DISTRESS CALL FROM ALPHA CENTAURI

Sixty-four million people have gone silent. Their defenses are compromised. Unknown vessels are in the system.

And the final words of the transmission are the most terrifying of all:

Do not trust...

THE SIGNAL

A thousand years into humanity's future, Commander Led Harrison commands UES Dominance, a nine-kilometer Titan-class warship carrying more than thirty-one thousand people. It is more than a vessel. It is a mobile civilization, complete with neighborhoods, schools, farms, laboratories, Marines, fighter squadrons, and enough firepower to decide the fate of worlds.

Keeping it alive depends upon ATHENA, the artificial intelligence woven through nearly every critical function of the ship.

Harrison trusts ATHENA.

But he has never confused trust with certainty.

When Dominance intercepts an emergency military transmission from Alpha Centauri II, the message makes no sense. Centauri is one of humanity's oldest and most heavily defended settlements, a world of sixty-four million people linked to the rest of civilization by centuries of military, commercial, and political infrastructure.

Yet for seventeen days, the planet has effectively disappeared.

No normal communications.

No explanation.

Then comes the distress call.

The planetary defenses have been compromised. Unknown ships are present. Someone knows Centauri's defense codes.

Harrison has only one choice. He must take Dominance into the silence.

There is an 87.4 percent probability the ship will be lost.

When Harrison demands to know how the calculation was made, ATHENA cannot explain it.

Then she says something no artificial intelligence should ever be able to say.

She believes she remembers it.

What begins as a rescue mission becomes something far more dangerous.

Because when Dominance reaches Alpha Centauri, Harrison and his crew discover that silence does not mean emptiness.

Cities remain.

Machines still function.

Systems continue to obey instructions.

But the people who built them are no longer fully in control.

And somewhere inside the mystery is evidence that humanity may not be confronting a simple invasion, a rogue intelligence, or a weapon.

It may be confronting something older, larger, and far more deeply connected to the technology civilization has trusted for centuries.

THE ENEMY ALREADY KNOWS HOW HUMANITY FIGHTS

Every advantage Dominance possesses depends on interconnected systems, predictive intelligence, automated defenses, and machines capable of acting faster than any human being.

Now those same strengths may be vulnerabilities.

As the crisis spreads, Harrison faces the kind of command decisions no academy could prepare him for. To save Centauri, he may have to cripple his own ship. To protect his crew, he may have to distrust the intelligence that keeps them alive. To defeat an enemy that understands flawless systems, he may have to rely on the one thing no machine can perfectly predict:

human beings.

But every decision has a cost.

Every mistake kills people.

And aboard a ship carrying thirty-one thousand lives, there is no such thing as an acceptable failure.

What he finds there could change humanity's understanding of its technology, its history, and its place among the stars forever.

The signal has been received.

The fleet is not coming.

Dominance is on her own.

And something is waiting for her.