Chapter 56: Echoes In Orbit

  Maya Duval moved like a ghost through Emberfall’s forgotten veins.

  The maintenance shaft she navigated wasn’t on any modern schematic. Her boots made no sound. Her helmet sealed tight. Her signal cloaked. If the colony had shadows, she lived in the deepest ones.

  At a rusted access port, she tapped into an auxiliary sensor bank, rerouting power through an abandoned relay. Dominion systems were built for surveillance.

  Maya was built to outpace them.

  The ghost signal from Sector 13 had changed. No longer a flare.

  A dialogue.

  And the reply?

  Not from Emberfall.

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  She isolated the waveform, tight, pulsing, deliberate. She enhanced it carefully, isolating the anomalies.

  Her heart skipped.

  SECOND NODE LINKED.

  Another node. Another piece of the network CAPRA had triggered.

  She launched a narrowband scanner drone through a collapsing duct line. Its tiny body ghosted into the civilian dock sector, thirty seconds of visibility before Dominion sensors caught it.

  The feed snapped into focus: Bay 7. The Cinderwolf.

  Kaelar in the pilot’s seat, posture tight. CAPRA hovered nearby, casting strange projections across the cockpit console.

  The drone caught a glimpse of a schematic.

  Large. Angular. Inhuman.

  Nothing in any Dominion archive matched it.

  Except one tag:

  OBSERVER VESSEL --- NON-TERRAN ORIGIN.

  Maya’s gut twisted.

  She killed the drone before it could be flagged.

  Her hands shook slightly as she sealed the connection.

  The first node had nearly killed them.

  The second?

  It was calling something.

  And Kaelar was answering.

  She whispered into her helmet, almost afraid to say it aloud:

  "I don’t know what you found, Kaelar... but if CAPRA’s leading you there…0

  0."

  Her fingers flew across the console.

  She launched her cutter from the hidden bay beneath Emberfall’s orbital spine. It slipped into the void like a blade through water, engines cold and silent.

  "then I’m going too."

  Outside, the stars spun quietly.

  Waiting.