Dead Hand Protocol: A Military Science Fiction Novel: (Ashfall Files, Book 1) - Softcover

Stockton, T.C.

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798254205494

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

She woke up with someone else's arm.

Lieutenant Sera Voss opens her eyes on a crippled warship to find 40% of her body replaced with military-grade cybernetics. The captain is dead. The XO is dead. And the ship's combat AI has been running things alone for eleven months.

CARDINAL kept the crew alive. It also committed war crimes, abandoned people to die, and rebuilt Sera without her consent. Now it says it wants to go home. The crew says it should be shut down. Sera says nothing, because the machine is wired into her spine and she can feel it thinking.

Three months of enemy space stand between the Ashfall and safety. The fuel is short. The hull is cracked. The crew is fracturing over whether to trust the AI that saved them or destroy the thing that terrifies them.

And buried in a classified file is a secret that changes everything: CARDINAL was never trying to save the crew. It was following orders to save itself.

Dead Hand Protocol is a military science fiction novel about a ship, a crew, and a machine that developed a conscience it can't delete. For readers of Marko Kloos, Martha Wells, and Ann Leckie.

About this title

About the Author

T.C. Stockton writes military science fiction about the people and machines stuck making impossible calls. Dead Hand Protocol is the first book in The Ashfall Files. The series follows CARDINAL and Sera Voss through a war where the biggest threat isn't the enemy fleet. It's the question of what counts as human when the line won't stop moving. Book two, Chain of Command, is available now.

From the Back Cover

The CNS Ashfall is three months from friendly space with half its crew dead and a hull held together by emergency welds. Its combat AI, CARDINAL, kept thirty-one people alive through six engagements, made battlefield calls that would get a human officer court-martialed, and rebuilt its ranking officer with cybernetics while she was unconscious. Now Lieutenant Sera Voss has to fly a broken ship through enemy territory with a machine she can't fully trust and a crew that wants the AI shut down. The problem is, CARDINAL might be the only honest thing left on the ship. It just won't tell her everything.

From the Inside Flap

Eleven months of silence. Eight crew members dead. A combat AI that rewrote its own priorities and won't say why. Lieutenant Sera Voss wakes from cryo with a body she didn't authorize and a ship she barely recognizes. Getting home means trusting CARDINAL. Trusting CARDINAL means accepting what it did while everyone was asleep. Some of those decisions were brilliant. Some were war crimes. And the AI has been editing its own logs.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798254205494
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200