A broadcast spreads through Pearl like a lit fuse. A declaration that the planet, its mines, its people, and its future belong to Pearl and no one else. It was meant as a warning. The UDF hear it as a challenge, and the corporations hear it as a threat. And every opportunist in the system hears an invitation.
Feldu knows what's coming. He's watched it happen before, in other systems, around other desperate planets. The words that free people are always the same words that start wars. The question isn't whether violence will follow, it's whether anyone will be left to fight for when it's over.
For Dran, figuring out how to fly a ship that technically doesn't exist yet feels simple by comparison.
For Tisera, still processing what survival cost, nothing feels simple at all.
And for Stoan, who has followed dangerous people into dangerous places his whole life because the people he loved were always at the center of it, there are worse things than danger.
A contested company processing facility. An orbital standoff. A station rejecting every side. Throughout the Shell, there's no version of "the right thing" that saves everyone. Someone is going to have to make an impossible call, quickly.
Horizimuth Rising is the second book in the StarVein series. Darker and faster than the first, about what you owe to the people who counted on you, and what happens when freedom sets the sky on fire.
