The Empress of Frozen Stars
The diagnostic sweep began at 0500 hours and the station answered with silence. Captain Rovik of the Imperial frigate Sovereign's Reach finds a derelict cargo hauler drifting at the edge of charted space, its hull scarred by something no enemy fleet should possess. The discovery pulls three unlikely figures into the same orbit: Kira Voss, a pilot haunted by her brother General Halric Voss and the wars he wages for the Empire; Seren Aldori, an analyst who reads patterns the Achernar AI was never meant to forget; and Dax Mireles, a smuggler whose debt to Baron Ulric Senn has just come due in blood. As the cargo's true nature surfaces before Tribunal Magistrate Orin, Rovik must choose between the law of the Empire and the silence of the void. Ambassador Veylan Kor offers a third path, one that crowns an empress built from ice, and burns everyone who refuses to kneel. With twenty chapters of shifting loyalties, hidden transmissions, and the slow awakening of something older than the Empire itself, every decision is a treaty signed in starlight. Claim the throne of frozen stars, or watch the dark take it first.