The starlanes had birthed empires and strangled them. For three centuries, the Terran Federation and the Xylosian Collective had carved their war across fifty light-years of contested space. Neither side remembered who fired first; neither cared. But now, a new weapon had risen from the deep dark, a living dreadnought, a space-whale of impossible size called the Kazamat. It drifted in the nebula of Thule, digesting the war’s worst liars in its seven-chambered gut.