Blurb

Commander Cade Cole wasn't looking for a fight. The fight found him in Berth 12-A.

A boy. A sealed cylinder humming with something that shouldn't exist. And a corporate fixer with clearance codes that cut through every lock on the station.

Cade does the one thing no port officer is supposed to do — he invokes the pause rule and shuts the whole berth down. Within hours, he's lost his badge, his ship is grounded, and the fixer called Pryce is dismantling his crew's credibility one docket at a time.

But the boy talks. And what he describes is bigger than one port.

Across the sector, a logistics network stamps every shipment at seventeen minutes past the hour. The cargo: nascent AI cores, grown in black-site facilities and transported alongside children — because a core needs a living nervous system to calibrate against before it wakes. At the destination, a garden world called Vestara, the core is buried in bedrock to run an entire biosphere. The child is removed. The mind runs paradise alone, forever, using patterns it learned from someone who is no longer there.

Cade takes his crew into the garden world to get the evidence out. The canopy is beautiful. The security force hunting them through it is not.

And the hardest choice isn't surviving Vestara. It's deciding whether to reveal the secret living aboard his own ship — an intelligence called Kite that nobody knows is awake.

The second book in the Wreckline series.