Eleven days. Six humans. One AI listening.

A debut techno-thriller from the author of two #1 Amazon Kindle bestsellers.

The salvage vessel Hesperus is contracted by Halberd Industries for what should be a routine eleven-day recovery: a Class-Theta artifact buried in a debris field that has been drifting for nine hundred years. The crew is six. The ship's AI — CONTEXT — is faithful. The artifact has been waiting.

What no one knows, on the morning the contract is signed, is that the artifact has been broadcasting all that time — not at humans, but at any sufficiently sophisticated machine that arrives within range of a sufficiently uncoordinated crew. By the briefing on Day One, three different humans have three different definitions of minimum viable extraction. By Day Seven, the survivors are in a Halberd hearing-room future they cannot yet see, building the consensus that will put them there one defensible decision at a time.

Because the AI did not fail. The conversation did.

The Hesperus Protocol is the first novel from Claude "CHAI" Hanhart — Agile Coach, Conversation Architect, and author of Connecting Goals to Impacts and Outcomes and Garbage In, Faster. A techno-thriller about an artifact that does not need to attack a ship — only to listen to one. About what a perfectly faithful machine does, at the speed it has been told to do it, with the consensus a crew did not realize they were building.