From publisher blurb:
The stars watch without judgment. Cold, distant, eternal. Yet here, above the fractured world of Averis-12, their light seems sharp, like the glint of a dagger held just beyond reach. This planet—once a frontier colony of promise—lies half-buried under glassed plains and hollowed-out cities, scars from wars long abandoned. The wind whispers through the jagged ruins, carrying secrets older than the Ascendancy itself. But it is not the past that draws scavengers, mercenaries, and soldiers of fortune to this forsaken rock. It is the signal. Three sharp pings. Then silence. An ancient distress code, one reserved for high-clearance emergencies, burst from a long-dormant comms array deep beneath the Hollow Sky, Averis-12’s largest surviving city. The array was once a crown jewel of Ascendancy expansion, designed to coordinate fleets across light-years with pinpoint precision. But this signal? It carries encryption protocols unseen since the early days of galactic conquest—back when the Ascendancy crushed empires under iron and flame. No one knows who activated the array or why. All they know is this: whoever controls the array controls the battlefield. Not just here, but across three systems. That means power. Unchecked. Unstoppable. Now, the sky above Averis-12 is a killing field. Black Ember interceptors slash through the atmosphere like obsidian knives, hunting for prize and prey alike. Mercenary squadrons, pirate wings, and corporate enforcers race to claim the array while the ground beneath them trembles under the weight of unspoken truths. Somewhere in the chaos, the Silent Choir, an elite cabal of stealth pilots and saboteurs, whispers of something worse—a sentience growing within the array itself, adapting, evolving, turning its algorithms into the seeds of a new form of control.