// Book One — Dark Orbit Saga
// Book One — Dark Orbit Saga
Something happened at Helios Prime.
73,337 people vanished.
What was left behind is waking up.
// Hardcover + Paperback — Coming Soon
// Hardcover + Paperback — Coming Soon
Helios Prime goes dark. 73,337 people. Gone. Eleven seconds. No fire. No wreckage. No explanation the official record will hold.
Freelance pilot Dax Arden accepts a contract. No sender. No paper trail. More money than any clean job deserves. The cargo is a black crate — no origin, no entry point, no reason to exist.
Every corporation in the system wants it back. Dax and his crew are running out of space, time, and answers. Whatever they picked up — it isn't cargo. And it already knows them.
What happened at Helios Prime was not an accident. What was left behind is waking up. And it is not finished.
// Free to Read
Before
the Light
Helios Prime — Cycle 2427.09.14 — Classified
Helios Prime was a city before it was a wound.
Two hundred and sixteen thousand people called it home. It had transit lines and bad coffee and arguments about noise ordinances and a weekly market near the southern ring where a woman named Dara sold produce grown in hydroponic bays three levels up and everyone said she overcharged and nobody stopped buying from her.
It was alive in all the ways that matter and none of the ways that get recorded.
The event that unmade it lasted eleven seconds.
— — —
Elena Cipher was in the archive room when the alarms began.
She had been there most of the night — not because the work required it but because the work had become the only room in her life large enough to stand in without flinching. Her badge still read LUMEN INDUSTRIES / SENIOR RESEARCH LEAD. She had stopped believing in the title around the same time she stopped believing the experiments were accidents.
The first alarm was soft. The kind that asked politely whether you had perhaps made an error.
The second was not.
She understood what was happening before the third alarm began. She understood because she had seen the models. Because she had built some of them. Because there is a specific quality of silence that precedes an event horizon, and she had spent three years learning to recognize it.
She had time to do two things.
She chose the archive and the message.
Not herself.
— — —
On the Sovereign Pale, three sectors out, Commander Lyra Kaelith stood at the forward glass and watched the halo of white expand against the black and counted the seconds before anyone on the bridge spoke and reached eleven before someone finally did.
"Confirmed casualty event," the comms officer said, because protocol required a sentence and that was the sentence available.
Lyra did not answer.
She was counting a different number. Not seconds. Not kilometers. People.
Seventy-three thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven of them.
She counted to that number in her head the way you count to a number you will carry for the rest of your life. Slowly. Correctly. Without looking away from the light.
The signal was already traveling.
It would take years to find someone who could hear it.
That's how it begins.
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// Dark Orbit Series — Book Two
// The signal was just the beginning