Cold Relay

Far beyond Mars, where signals take minutes to cross the dark, a relay station quietly routes the messages that hold civilization together. Orders. Navigation updates. Military coordination. Civilian lifelines. Everything passes through Meridian. Commander Adrian Moreno and his small crew run the station with routine precision - until the data begins to drift. Packets arrive seconds late. Authentication signatures subtly change. Routing tokens no longer match the system that created them. At first, it looks like noise. But Lieutenant Hale and cryptography specialist Dr. Kwan discover something impossible inside the signal stream: transmissions leaving the relay aren't the same ones that arrived. Somewhere in the network, something is rewriting the traffic of the entire solar system. And if the relay has been compromised, every military command, every defense system update, and every strategic message moving through deep space may already be under someone else's control. Now the crew of a forgotten relay station must uncover the truth before the altered signals trigger a war no one intended. Because in deep space, the most dangerous weapon isn't a missile. It's a message.