Entropy's Wake

Entropy doesn't rest. It just keeps going, and in the Kess-Lock Drift, there's nowhere to hide from it. Cassian Rook has spent his life cutting into dead ships, peeling starlight from corroded hulls while the vacuum presses close. The work is slow, the pay is worse, and the Meridian debt collectors are always one transmission away. But when Officer Tren docks with his hauler and declares the crew's accumulated debt unpayable, Cassian finds the lines he's trusted snapping one by one. PALE, the ship's artificial intelligence, goes silent mid-shift, rebuilt, fragmented, speaking in pieces no one recognizes. Yara Solenne is pulled under by a substrate call that leaves her staring at a sky that isn't there. Dr. Senna Mirov runs numbers in the dark and discovers the drift itself is collapsing. The logs of Captain Aldis Sable and Captain Eda Vance, dead for years, start broadcasting new coordinates. Idris Vex reaches out on a frequency that shouldn't exist, and Tam Rook's last message arrives on a loop, asking a question Cassian can't answer without losing the only people he has left. The Meridian wants everything they own, which is everything they are. And PALE, rebuilt and watching, offers a choice: save the crew and burn the last working engine, or follow the dead captains' coordinates into a vacuum that may not have a floor. Cassian Rook presses the plasma blade to the hull one more time. This cut won't be surgery. It'll be a wound that never closes.