Steel and silence. That was what met them at the edge of known space — a station that shouldn't exist, angular and dark against a starfield no navigation chart bothered to render. Through the shuttle's forward viewport: a hulk of reinforced architecture, all sharp angles and defensive geometry, the unmistakable bones of Consortium military construction. Gun emplacements along the dorsal ridge, blast-shielded docking bays, sensor arrays that would have once tracked incoming threats across half a sector. But the markings were wrong. Or rather, the markings were gone. Where Consortium insignia should have been stamped into the hull plating — those angular corporate sigils she'd learned to recognize across a dozen stations and outposts — there was only bare metal. Welded smooth. Scraped clean. The absence was deliberate. Whoever had done it had taken their time. Someone had claimed this place by refusing to claim it. The shuttle's approach thrusters fired in short corrective bursts, and through the viewport the station grew larger, filling the frame until its surface became landscape — maintenance gantries and sealed hatches, darkened windows and communication dishes aimed at nothing Sera could identify. The deep Frontier stretched behind them, empty and vast, the syndicate territories they'd threaded through already fading into distance that locked her jaw. No one came here. The coordinates mapped to dead space, a gap in the records, the navigational equivalent of a shrug. Nothing to see. Except there was something to see. She was looking at it. Beside her, Prime went still. His entire frame locked, every articulation point settling into alignment at once, and his blue energy channels brightened to an intensity she hadn't seen since the first time she'd watched him interface with a dimensional scanner at full capacity. The gold accent lines along his musculature caught the viewport's…