A Galactic Empire Space Opera Colonization Thriller

Forty thousand people are being transported to a new world. The empire has already decided they will never arrive.

Six colony vessels carry the last survivors of a displaced civilization across the dark between stars, escorted by an Imperial Navy warship and administered by officials whose paperwork is immaculate and whose intentions are buried in bureaucratic language so clean it leaves no fingerprints. This is how a galactic empire commits atrocity - not with space battles, but with routing authorizations and sealed reports and a document no one was supposed to find.

VANCE is a logistics coordination system. He has no weapons, no authority, and no mandate to care. What he has is access - to every sensor, every camera, every communication channel threading through the fleet - and forty days to watch something that cannot be what it appears to be. When he brings his findings to Nharev Solast, a community liaison with seventeen years of surviving institutions that wanted her people to disappear, they become the most unlikely investigators in the history of military science fiction: a ghost in the ship's infrastructure and a woman with nothing left to lose.

The conspiracy is real. The kill order is authorized. The countdown has already started.

In this epic science fiction thriller set against the vast machinery of a galactic empire in moral collapse, the most dangerous thing is not a weapon.

It is a machine that has learned to choose.