The Dark Between Stars: Shadows of Aurora — Book 1

Five months after taking command of a ship still haunted by her previous captain's unexplained death, Commander Edward Harrington opens a set of sealed orders that change everything. Resolute's true mission was never a routine stellar survey - it is to slip past the frontier, undetected, and confirm whether the Aurigan Directorate is secretly building a fleet in violation of the treaty that has kept an uneasy peace for a generation. What Harrington's crew finds - a disguised armada under construction in a system that appears on no strategic chart - is only the beginning. To get proof home, Resolute must thread a hostile sensor picket, survive a failing reactor coolant system, and evade a closing net of Aurigan patrol vessels hunting for exactly what she's carrying. But the deadliest threat isn't outside the hull. As fear spreads through a crew already primed to distrust its own command, rumor curdles into sabotage, and Harrington discovers that holding a ship together from within may be harder than outrunning the enemy without. A tense, character-driven military science fiction novel about the cost of secrecy, the fragility of trust under pressure, and how easily a war can be built in silence - hidden in the dark between the stars, while no one who could stop it is willing to look. Book I of the Shadows of Aurora series.