Chapter 18 · Outside the Safe Zone

The distress signals arrived all at once.

Every civilian vessel in the Helios corridor screamed across the command deck, overlapping in a burst of static and broken voices. Children cried through open channels. Docking clerks shouted coordinates. A freighter captain repeated the same sentence until it became a prayer.

“Unknown military traffic inside the corridor. We are being denied exit clearance. Please—someone answer—”

The transmission cut into a wash of white noise.

Evan Venn stood beneath the navigation table with one hand braced against its edge. The deck rolled hard enough to make the stars smear across the forward glass. Behind him, the Blue Heron’s engines shuddered as Oren Cade forced power through systems that had been designed for hauling ore, not outrunning a committee fleet.

On the tactical display, the Helios frontier gate burned red.

Three concentric rings of the jump relay hung in orbit around a dead moon, each one wrapped in construction scaffolds and civilian traffic. The gate’s activation sequence had already begun.