The Wrong Number

A perfect system has produced one impossible error.

Captain Daniel Cross commands the ISV Lodestar at the height of humanity's golden age - a frontier where cargo mountains fall between worlds, catcher chains talk them down, and audited numbers keep civilisation alive.

Then one number is wrong.

A cargo pod disappears from the books while still falling toward a station. A tug returns with its crew missing. A corridor that feeds whole colonies is being quietly falsified by someone with access they should not have, and every official system insists the lie is true.

Cross has built his command on trust: trust in the data, trust in the roads, trust in the institutions that hold the frontier together. To save the people downstream, he must choose between the clean answer the system gives him and the ugly truth his crew can barely prove.

Because out here, a wrong number is not a clerical error.

It is a weapon.

The Wrong Number is Book 1 of The Reach, a hard science fiction frontier adventure set in the wider Fracture Cosmology. It is a complete entry point for new readers: starship command, failing infrastructure, alien alliance, and the first quiet crack in a golden age.