The Wrong Number

The ISV Lodestar works the Rivas Corridor at the height of a frontier golden age — a chain of catcher stations flinging sealed mountains of cargo across the system and catching them gentle as freight, run by a captain, Daniel Cross, who buys real coffee with his own pay and still isn't tired of watching the catch come in. Then a tug arrives down the lane empty, where a crewed one should be, and the astonishment of the thing curdles into something worse.

Inside a stolen freight stream, Cross finds people — hidden, alive, and not supposed to be there — and a sabotage that is not the crime it was dressed up as. Book One of The Reach: a complete standalone frontier thriller, and the quiet opening of a cold war the people fighting it have not yet admitted is coming.