When the transmission arrived it was nothing more than a flatline across every frequency—no carrier, no timestamp, no language—only a vector of silence that nonetheless hummed with an impossible signature. Mara Kade, once a reconnaissance captain for the Terran Arcology Fleet and now a haunted salvage diver, felt the room tilt as her console parsed the anomaly into metadata: coordinates buried in entropy, a fragment of someone’s heartbeat encoded between empty frames. The orbital skyline outside her window burned with neon ads and the slow tumble of derelict platforms; beneath that glittering menace, a privatized security force known as WardenCore tightened its chokehold on information and life. Mara’s last mission had cost her a crew and a promise; the blank signal dredged up faces she’d tried to forget and the ledger of a crime she had sworn to expose. As raiders and corporate drones converged, she had thirty-six minutes before a WardenCore packet tracer triangulated the source; in that time she could either steal a rusted scout and chase the coordinates through the twilight lanes of the Belt, risking the void where transmissions go to die, or break into the orbital archive to force the Warden’s hand and learn who wanted silence broadcast across the systems. Lightning cracked over the city; her ship’s hull still bore the scorch mark from the day the Fleet branded her a fugitive. Somewhere in the blankness, someone had left a sign—a void with a name hidden inside. The choice would put her on a path that could unravel the corporation, the Fleet, and the fragile truth of her own past, and whichever route she picked, the silence would not stay empty for long.