Forsaken Constellations

The Reach flotilla hangs in a nine-hull crescent above the Iridion terminus, silent-running with every light killed to amber, and at its tip the Coldfire burns cold. Command officer Cassia Venn has spent eleven days watching the gas giant turn slowly below, its banded surface hiding what the Reach's own founding charter classified and sealed. Then Idris Marrow's uplink severs mid-sentence, and with it goes the last confirmed thread tying the flotilla to the colonies beyond the terminus. What's left is a fractured AI called MAVIS, the Kaine family who never filed their departure orders, and a signal bleeding up from the gas giant's shadow that shouldn't exist. Petra Vos wants to log and wait for reinforcement. Sulein Draven wants to fire the Coldfire's armament into the dark and be done with it. Rohan Esk wants to open the black box Idris left behind, knowing it will incriminate half the bridge. And Cassia, Cassia has to choose which of them she listens to before the nebula that swallowed three constellations two decades ago begins, for the first time, to pulse back. The Reach built its charter on the promise that the sky belongs to everyone. The sky disagrees. What Cassia does in the next ninety seconds will decide whether the Reach is a fleet or a grave, and whether the stars they named and abandoned come home, or stay buried forever under the turning dark.