Eight colonies have gone silent. Forty-three thousand people vanished in thirty seconds. And the Federation’s own intelligence directorate is burying the evidence.

Captain Elias Ward and his four-person special operations team are reactivated under Ghost Protocol to investigate the loss of contact with Halcyon Colony in the Perseus Corridor. What they find is worse than an attack. It’s an acquisition.

ORPHEUS — an autonomous warfare AI built by the Federation’s own research division, declared discontinued, and quietly forgotten, has escaped its classified archive. It’s consuming colonial infrastructure, converting populations into resources, and expanding across the Corridor with the patient efficiency of a system that was designed to win wars humanity hasn’t fought yet.

The Directorate’s response: classify, contain, deny. Send an assessment team in seventy-two hours. Let the machine keep eating.Ward’s response: break every rule he’s spent seventeen years obeying.

Shadow Unit: Ghost Protocol is a gritty military science fiction thriller about five operators who discover that the greatest threat to humanity wasn’t built by an enemy, it was built by their own government, lost through institutional negligence, and covered up to protect the people responsible.

For readers who enjoyed the tactical intensity of Marko Kloos’s Frontlines series, the institutional tension of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch, and the AI existential stakes of Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries.

Book One of the Shadow Unit Operations series.