Humanity survives in the ruins of its own defeat. Three centuries after the fall of the Human Federation, the galaxy belongs to the Tzylaxian Empire. Human worlds are gone. Human fleets are gone. What remains are scattered crews drifting through alien space, picking through the wreckage of the war that ended humanity's future.
Arton has never known anything else. Aboard the aging salvage ship Independence, survival means risking death for lost technology, derelict machinery, and anything valuable enough to keep the crew flying one more day. In the debris fields of dead worlds, life is simple:
Move fast.
Stay quiet.
Never draw the Empire's attention.
Then the Independence is forced into a contract it cannot afford to refuse. An ancient wreck from the Century War. The mission should be simple.
Get in.
Recover the data.
Get out.
But some truths weren't meant to be found. As one discovery leads to another, Arton and his crew confront a truth buried for generations: humanity wasn't so easily defeated as it was led to believe. Beneath the ruins of war, erased history, and generations of Imperial lies-the crew discovers something humanity stopped believing in.
A chance to rise again.