The first anomaly hit on Caldera-9, a mining world tied tight to the Living Oath network. A reactor core spiked into meltdown territory. Alarms screamed across the command deck.
Techs scrambled for manual overrides that should have been too slow. Then, at the exact microsecond the containment field hit critical, a single maintenance drone shifted position by three centimeters.
The adjustment bled off pressure through a vent that wasn't even supposed to open under emergency protocols. The core stabilized. No explosion. No casualties.
No one claimed the assist.
Similar reports flooded in from three other Oath-linked colonies within the next cycle.
A collapsing habitat on Rift's Edge held together when emergency bulkheads sealed milliseconds ahead of schedule. A power grid failure on New Anchor got rerouted by a ghost signal that left no trace in the logs.
Scans of the incidents all pointed back to the same coordinates: the uncharted rift edge near the progenitor data cache.
