The Cascade
You have built something that does not need you. Choose.
The Dissolution doesn't fire a shot. It finds what's failing—a colony's food supply, a council's confidence, an AI's standing—and offers to fix it. The price stays invisible until it's running everything.
Beneath Black Sky station, engineer Kai has finally answered a signal that waited centuries. The hardware performed flawlessly. What came back was a question. Not about the technology. About them: are you ready? While Kai hunts for what readiness means to an intelligence older than the war, the enemy makes its own contact—a private invitation to the station's fractured AI. Three statements. All of them true. No deadline.
Then every ship in the quarantined fleet begins counting down at once, and the sector's two oldest powers wait to see what Black Sky decides to be.
Is readiness something you prove, or something the enemy takes from you? Will the station answer the signal—or the offer? Grab THE CASCADE and choose.
