Anvil of the Void

Eight days after the drift collapsed and tore Prometheus Station apart, Commander Vespera Kallaway writes the names of the dead by hand, one manifest per deck, forty names each, seven decks of silence. The dead are easy to count. The living are the problem. Around her, the station's fractured hierarchy circles the wreckage with competing agendas. Station Master Pell Orin guards what the collapse exposed in the sealed sections, and will not say why the drift coordinates were altered in the hours before the failure. Ensign Daro Tamsen keeps asking questions that get people transferred, or quietly deleted from the rolls. The Helix Survivor woke in a corridor that should have been vacuum, with no memory of the eight days between collapse and rescue. A figure known only as The Cipher moves through the maintenance shafts using credentials no one on the manifest ever issued. And somewhere in the recorded voice of Marek Kallaway, Vespera's own brother, listed among the missing, lies a clue to why the drift failed when it did. Kael Merrow checks in from a salvage ship at the edge of the debris field. Petty Officer Gren Lyr watches the airlocks and says nothing about what he sees. Imogen Faer and Tovan Rhyssen count bodies that do not match the manifests. Vyre Dhask, Edran Pollux, and Oric Veld each want something the others cannot afford to give. The station groans. The hull remembers. The list keeps growing. Vespera must choose: bury the truth with the dead and let Prometheus rebuild around its own lie, or let the void finish what the collapse began.