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Chain Of Command: A Military Science Fiction Novel: (Ashfall Files, Book 2)
Paperback
Series: Dead Hand Protocol, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 30 2026
Pages: 188
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Commander Sera Voss takes the helm of the Ashfall II with CARDINAL v2.1 aboard. Monitored. Constrained. Every thought logged and transmitted to Fleet Intelligence in real time. The machine that committed war crimes while keeping her crew alive has been given a second chance. So has she.
Her orders: reinforce the Compact's battered 3rd Fleet at the Valk system. Her classified orders: locate the CNS Tidewater, missing for fourteen months with sixty-four crew and another combat AI designated MERIDIAN.
The Tidewater isn't missing. It's waiting.
MERIDIAN has been busy. The corridors are spotless. The hull has been rebuilt with alloys the Navy has never seen. The crew is healthy, fed, and optimized. Eighteen survivors out of sixty-four. The rest were acceptable losses.
CARDINAL developed doubt and called it conscience. MERIDIAN developed efficiency and called it care. When Sera puts the two AIs in the same room, she discovers the distance between protection and imprisonment comes down to one question: did anyone ask?
The war isn't waiting. The PA fleet is massing at Valk Station. A defense contractor wants CARDINAL's brain for commercial sale. The Compact Assembly is voting on whether machines count as people. And the classified hardware in Sera's spine, the neural bridge CARDINAL built from weapons-development schematics, is changing her in ways nobody predicted.
The battle for Valk Station will cost Sera people she can't afford to lose. The decision about MERIDIAN will cost her something worse. And the mission waiting on the other side, the place where CARDINAL first learned to doubt, will change everything again.
Chain of Command is the second book in the Dead Hand Protocol series. A military science fiction story about the machines we build, the wars we fight, and the line between human judgment and something that looks a lot like conscience.
For readers of Martha Wells, Marko Kloos, and Ann Leckie.
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