The Echoes We Carve

Vega Maren surfaces from cryosleep to arterial red and a ship that should not be here. The hull is breached, the crew is scattered across failing pods, and every system log has been scrubbed of the mission that put them in stasis. With her brother Idris and a fractured crew, including the guarded Toma Vasquez, the volatile Bardin twins, and the mission commander whose orders no one can quite remember, Vega must coax the truth out of a vessel that seems determined to keep its secrets. Every recovered memory unlocks another lock, but also triggers another buried fail-safe. Complicities surface: Halla Drest knows more than her rank suggests, Yara Ondek's research was quietly redacted, and Ren Tass has been carrying a side-agreement that could fracture the survivors. As the drift closes in, alliances shift, loyalties splinter, and a single decision will determine whether the crew escapes with what they know, or carves that knowledge into a grave. The mission is waking up. The question is whether the crew will, too.