Lunar Protocol

Synopsis

After agreeing to cooperate with The Circle, Kael Morrow leaves Fobos with an irrevocable condition: Draven Cole will go with him. Not by confidence with those who have recruited him, or by faith in his promise, but by loyalty to the dead of Anabasis and by the certainty that someone used his crew as an instrument to shed a truth that should not be touched. At a medical facility classified under the lunar surface, Kael finds out that she's not the first to survive TANIT. That's where a man with a degree 4 mark has been locked up in a room without windows for seven years, covering his walls with an impossible figure made up of medication, food and blood. What felt delirium was actually a plant: a partial representation of the inner cylinder. And as Kael looks at that map, she recognizes a fragment. The same fragment that the presence at the edge of his consciousness repeats from his contact with TARIT. While The Circle tries to understand what kind of marking Kael is, other forces start to move. At the lower levels of L5, Ryn, an operative with no true name and four active identities, receives from Vendetta a precise command: to find Captain Morrow before his disappearance again. But at the station's margins, between second and third generation emulators, sex turned into transaction and broken increased reality, Ryn finds that Kael's price has been put only Vendetta. Someone else knows TANIT. Someone else looks for an image that shouldn't exist. At L3, the Circle Conclave met for the first time in four years. Thirty-six members, and The First, listen to the revelation that will change the scale of the threat: TARIT's 18th pulse will not aim at interstellar space. It will aim into the solar system. For decades, someone - or something - responded to earlier pulses, and TANIT is about to confirm that the response was received. Lunar protocol leads Tanit's call from Kael's traumatic survival to the secret war through manual control, TANIT's inner plant and the next pulse's destination. The Circle sees at Kael a potential channel capable of reading what destroys other carrier. Vendetta's after him. H3D hides impossible images. Ryn begins to understand that she has accepted a contract with a price that will change before she's charged. And Asha Okafor finds that the 18th pulse could signify a concrete location: Mercury. Where's Meridian Data. That's where MOIRAI's at. And perhaps where humanity already responded to TANIT without knowing.