Dead Captain Protocol

Dead Captain Protocol
Book 1 of the Mercer's Run Series
Note: Revised Edition corrects minor text issues identified in the first release (September 2025).

By E.M. Thomben

From the Author: The Dead Captain Protocol began as a handful of rough notes and a half-formed idea, set aside and revisited over quite a while. Recently, I committed to finishing it-and I'm glad I did. Enjoy the read.

Tom "Irish" Mercer didn't sign up for command. He signed maintenance logs. Re-routed coolant feeds. Filed thermal degradation reports for jump coils that never got replaced. A veteran-turned-systems tech just looking to keep his head down on the long-haul freighter Harrowgate.

But when a containment breach rocks Deck Four and wipes out the bridge crew, Mercer wakes up in a corridor full of smoke, blood, and silence-and no one left to outrank him.

The AI, Gallow, is glitching or gone. Communications are down. Engineering is sealed under emergency lockdown. And worst of all, the ship's black cargo-five cryogenically-contained synthetic warforms-wasn't just classified.

One of them is missing.

Now, by sheer survival and Fleet hierarchy, Mercer is the acting captain of a ship teetering on the edge of catastrophe. With only a fractured crew, a sarcastic security officer who doesn't trust anyone (least of all him), and a sidearm that's two rounds shy of useful, he has to restore power, figure out who sabotaged Harrowgate, and stop whatever's crawling around the lower decks before it kills the rest of them.

Because this wasn't an accident. The blast was deliberate. And someone-somewhere-wants Harrowgate to go dark.

Permanently.

Dead Captain Protocol is the explosive launch of Mercer's Run, a new hard sci-fi space opera series from E.M. Thomben, author of The Echo Cartel and The Absent Mind Protocol.

Fast-paced and grounded in real science, this is a story built for readers who love gritty survival, shipboard problem-solving, dry humour under pressure, and conspiracies that unravel one failed subsystem at a time.

There are no prophecies here. No chosen ones. Just a stubborn ex-tech trying to keep his ship together while someone-or something-wants it scattered across the void.