The Voidwake Accord

Drassa Veylan rebuilds her ship with parts scavenged from dead hulls and keeps her head down at Meridian Station, where the Concord's reach is a rumor and the heliopause is the only wall between humanity and the void. She has no interest in politics, no loyalty to the Concord, and no reason to care about an Accord that was signed in a building she's never seen. Then a Concord Echo Drone crashes into her cockpit and broadcasts a single coordinate before it dies. The destination is a derelict station beyond the heliopause where a decommissioned AI has been running for decades without maintenance, cultivating a biological spore network across its hulls. The spore network is communicating with Korvani deep-space relays. And the Concord's response is not investigation , it is a tribunal, a firing squad, and a lie that will hold the peace together until it doesn't. Drassa carries the only proof that Chancellor Rovik's projected image has been running Concord policy for three years without a living body behind it. The Korvani Envoy wants it destroyed. The Tribunal wants her destroyed. Her mother's last recording is encoded inside the signal, and the only person who can decode it is a Fixer working for the salvage crews that strip derelicts for parts. The Smuggler Pilot who flies her into the void doesn't ask questions, but he counts bodies. The Derelict AI doesn't lie, but it doesn't help either , it simply shows her what the spore network has learned from forty years of listening to the dark between stars. The Accord was never meant to last. It was meant to buy time. The time is up, and Drassa must decide whether the truth is worth the war it will start, or whether some agreements are better left broken in silence.