Voidwake

A single amber light pulses beneath the carrier Meridian , steady, mechanical, waiting. After forty-three years in conservation mode, the ship's ancient AI stirs back to awareness as the Lazarus Frequency tears across Confederate space. The signal carries coordinates to humanity's first colony ship, long declared lost , and inside its archive, something that should have stayed silent. Commander Vega Hess inherits a crew fractured by years of skeleton-crew drift, a sister bond between Dael and Yuki Tashiro pulled taut by grief, and MIRIN, a synthetic consciousness slowly losing coherence with each waking cycle. When transmissions from the archive begin rewriting themselves , Anya Voss speaking through substrate, a captain's mind preserved for decades, voices that bleed across time , the mission transforms from rescue into something far more dangerous. Priya Akinyele and Wei-Lin Cho push the ship's failing systems toward a window that will not stay open. Bron Voss preserves his mother's last recordings. And somewhere in the static, Caelan Tashiro reaches across the substrate toward the family he left behind. The Meridian can answer the call , or finally fall silent. Either choice rewrites what humanity carries into the dark.