Echo Protocol
A Frontier of Ash and Light Novel
Rowen Keir hears what other people call noise. As a communications specialist aboard the survey vessel Carteret, her job is to listen to the outer bands of space and find the patterns everyone else misses. When a faint, layered signal appears in the static at 03:12 ship's time, she knows two things immediately: it should not be there-and someone built it that way on purpose.
The signal's architecture is wrong for natural scatter and wrong for any known beacon. Each layer teaches the cipher for the next, a quiet, patient structure designed for a very particular kind of listener. The deeper Rowen reads, the clearer it becomes that this isn't a broadcast. It's a selection process. And the timestamp embedded in its structure points to a fleet survey ship officially lost in the Kethara Margin seventeen years ago: the FSV Orvaine.
Captain Elias Rhyse has built his command-and his conscience-on doing things by the book. Seventeen years ago he watched an incident in the same sector disappear into classification and withdrew the one report that might have stopped it. Now the Carteret has been sent to the Margin with the exact array the signal requires, a corporate-backed rival ship is already waiting in the adjacent sector, and someone inside his own crew is quietly suppressing anomaly alerts and forwarding data off-ship.
Under quarantine, with a mole in their systems and a better-resourced director pressing to take control, Rowen and Elias have three impossible tasks: decode the full five-layer signal architecture, get the Orvaine's buried record to someone the Compact cannot silence, and decide how far they are willing to bend protocol to tell the truth. What they uncover will rewrite the official history of the Kethara Margin-and put a target on everyone who helped bring it to light.
The more they work, the more the intimacy of the problem becomes its own kind of gravity: late watches over the same console, shared coffee from a private stash, a lockdown that forces Elias to finally admit the report he withdrew, and a quiet, adult attraction built on watching each other think. When the crisis breaks, their choices-to trust, to listen, to stand together against institutional pressure-will decide whether the Orvaine's crew are forgotten casualties or named in the record they died to leave behind.
Echo Protocol is a slow-burn space-opera romance about competence, trust, and the cost of listening when powerful institutions would rather you didn't. Fans of character-driven sci-fi romance will find:
A meticulous, first-person heroine whose greatest weapon is attention.
A restrained, principled captain quietly undone by the way she uses it.
A found-family crew who choose their people before their orders.
An ancient signal, a buried cover-up, and a choice that becomes the spine of the entire Frontier of Ash and Light series.
It can be read as the first full-length novel in Frontier of Ash and Light or directly after the novella Vane's Cipher.
