Five Hours of Silence

January 1986. Voyager 2 is closing on Uranus, and the observations ahead cannot be repeated.

Crisis coordinator Sarah Kessler is called to investigate a receiver discrepancy that threatens two irreplaceable scientific objectives. Every office can defend its own records. Every approved answer appears reasonable. Together, they produce a result that cannot be true.

As the encounter clock contracts, Sarah draws engineers, operators, and scientists across institutional boundaries to reconstruct what the official process concealed. The apparent technical choice leads to a waived readiness result, divided evidence, and an unofficial recovery route whose creator has selected Sarah for reasons no one will explain.

To protect the mission, Sarah must do what made her professionally dangerous: distrust the institutions she serves. To protect her team, she must confront the habit that may cost her their trust-deciding for other people what they are allowed to know.

Five Hours of Silence is the first novel in The Last Window Series, a sequence of self-contained technical suspense stories connected by a larger mystery.