Shadow Unit: Burning Frontier

Nine ships destroyed in a shared transit lane. Two hundred and fourteen dead. Every weapon signature reads Federation.

The convoy is still burning when a Combine patrol finds it. No distress calls, no escape pods, no survivors. The drive signatures are Federation Navy, the hull fragments are Federation composite, and the strike was fast enough and thorough enough that nobody aboard nine ships got a beacon away. That is not a skirmish on a contested border. That is intent.

Ward’s team crosses a line they were never cleared to cross, into a theatre where Combine hardliners already want a war and somebody has taken considerable trouble to hand them a reason for one. What waits on the other side is a shared enemy neither government will admit to, two liars who each have half of the truth, and Aegis: a defensive system that was supposed to be dormant.

Then Aegis wakes up. Its logic is sound, its threat model is complete, and it was built on an assumption that is about to fail. As Chief Sol Ren puts it: every security model assumes the threat is human, and that is the vulnerability.

The fourth Shadow Unit Operations novel. A false flag, an alliance nobody can put in writing, and a cold peace bought at a price the people who paid it will not be allowed to talk about.