The Wreckage Field Was Ours — Until It Wasn't

The dead do not shoot back. That was the rule. That was the certainty. A human battle group, annihilated in eleven minutes, its reactors blown, its hulls venting atmosphere into the dark, its silence stretching on for six full days. The salvage fleet came to pick the bones clean. Standard procedure. No risk. No glory, even — just quiet, profitable work stripping a graveyard. Except the hull integrity was too high. Except the wreckage was too intact. Except nobody on that bridge thought to ask why a fleet reported dead in writing still had most of its skeleton standing. They should have asked. By the time they did, forty Kortessi boarders had already stepped into corridors that were never empty, and a voice was already moving fleet-wide over an open channel, calm and absolutely certain, saying three words that had been waiting six days to be said. A hard sci-fi military thriller. New stories every week.