The Signal Keeper of Outpost Nine

About this book:

Twelve-year-old Leo knows every groan of Outpost Nine, a hollowed-out iron asteroid clinging to the dark edge of the Belt. On the graveyard shift, surrounded by vacuum tubes and endless static, he monitors the com-array while the colony sleeps beneath three miles of rock—until the night the long-range dish locks onto something that shouldn't exist.

Buried beneath the cosmic hiss is a precise, repeating pattern: a double-nested code transmitting from Sector 7, an unmapped sector of dead rock and debris. When Leo cracks the signal, he discovers coordinates and a mass prediction pointing to one terrifying conclusion—something massive, uncataloged, and on a collision course with the Iron Pebble. And Chief Engineer Miller is too busy snoring in the breakroom to care.

Armed with only a salvaged tuning fork, a beat-up diagnostic pad, and his own quiet brilliance, Leo must decipher the message before the unknown sender arrives. In a station built on forgotten scrap and buried secrets, one boy's midnight discovery may be the only warning Outpost Nine will ever get.