Chapter 11 · The Silent Colony

The first message from Orison Colony contained no words.

It arrived as a narrow-band pulse buried beneath the fleet’s collision telemetry, too weak to trigger the emergency filters and too regular to be stellar noise. Three seconds of static. A pause. Then three more.

Evan stared at the waveform trembling above his navigation console while pain throbbed from his shoulder to the tips of his fingers.

Across the bridge of the Resolute, damage alarms blinked in uneven constellations. The ghost relay had left half the fleet nursing scorched conduits and unstable shields. The air smelled of hot insulation, antiseptic, and the metallic edge of recycled smoke.

Sera stood beside the command rail with one hand pressed against her ribs. A transparent seal covered the cut on her forehead, but a dark thread of blood had escaped beneath it and dried along her temple.

She should have been in medical.

So should Evan.

Neither had gone.

Mara Quill leaned over the auxiliary intelligence station, pale light carving sharp hollows beneath her eyes. The relay core archive rotated above her in layered rings of encrypted records.

“I have Hale’s outbound authorization chain,” she said. “Not all of it. Enough to follow.