A Fistful of Ghosts

Human conscript Tess Corwin has one objective: keep her squad alive long enough to get home. When her unit is deployed onto a contested alien world as escort for a Sporewind trade negotiation, the mission looks routine — until the ship lifts off without them and a living biotank tears through the treeline.They were never the escort. They were the distraction.Cut off, hunted, and trapped inside a collapsing alien facility, Tess leads her people deeper — through sealed hatches, beneath the ruins, into a chamber that shouldn't exist. What she finds there isn't Sporewind technology. It isn't Free Systems hardware. It's older than either civilization by tens of thousands of years. And it recognizes her.Buried beneath a world that two alien factions have been fighting over for decades is a vault of human memory — proof that humanity once built something vast enough that its enemies feared it long after it fell. The Sporewind sealed it. The Free Systems never knew it existed. And now a conscript who was told her entire life that she was expendable is the only person standing between that knowledge and the people who want it buried again.A Fistful of Ghosts is a seven-part HFY science fiction story about survival, hidden history, and what happens when the galaxy discovers the grave was empty.