The lights flickered. The hum of the ship’s engines changed pitch. And then the file opened on its own. The screen blazed to life not with a menu, but with a raw, shaky feed. Italian subtitles burned into the bottom— “iTA” —but the audio was battlefield English, ripped from a source that sounded like it had been recorded through a dead trooper’s helmet mic.

The footage was from Station Titan. The Invasion . Marcus had heard the stories—the lost outpost, the breached quarantine, the betrayal that the Federation never officially acknowledged. But this... this was different.

He looked out the porthole. The fleet was gone. The stars were wrong. And somewhere deep in the ship’s hull, a sound he knew too well echoed through the vents.