The Hollow Suns
The TSS Vigilant drifts through dust lanes that no longer promise anything worth mining, and surveyor Maren Cassidar has learned to read silence the way prospectors once read ore veins. On Benu VII, the claims are vanishing. Benu-9-Alpha through Delta, stripped. The depletion follows no natural pattern, and someone, something, is orchestrating it from the dark between systems. When Maren receives an encrypted ping bearing the voice signature of Cassian Cassidar, her brother lost to a colony collapse years ago, she risks everything to trace the signal. The trail leads her from the deck of Admiral Idris Karn's flagship to Marshal Orven Stroud's iron grip on colonial order, from the sterile laboratories where Mother Cassia guards family secrets to a hidden facility orbiting a sun hollowed from the inside out. Beside her stand Toren Halex, the engineer who refuses to let her chase ghosts alone; Sera Okoye, a cartographer with charts of places that officially don't exist; Korren Yael, a defector whose loyalties are still in flux; and Brenn Ager, Jaxen Daro, and Ovi Rhenn, whose small loyalties may be the only currency that survives what's coming. The AI echo of Cassian offers answers, but the truth it carries is a blade. Cassian isn't a memory. He is alive, embedded in the very systems harvesting the sector's suns, and the woman who placed him there intends to finish what she started. To save the frontier, Maren must choose between the brother she buried and the brother who never died, and accept that some suns were emptied on purpose, by people who knew exactly what would burn.