You can't trust your ears—and you sure as hell can't trust the chorus.
The salvage corvette URV Sibilant is dispatched to Kora-9, a reef-world whose abandoned terraforming rigs have begun to broadcast a pattern—an emergent "song"—strong enough to stall satellites and crack hull plating. Captain Imani Veer's orders from the Outer Reserves are tangled and cruel: extract any surviving colonists from the ghost-settlement at Verdigris Port, copy the pattern's core "songseed," and then erase every trace before rival powers can hear it. The first task is a long shot. The second could doom anyone who tries it.
The route runs straight through the Hush Corridor, territory of the Anchorate of Jin Xiu—neutral, wealthy, and vindictive. Their Silver Lantern escorts shadow Sibilant from jump to jump, enforcing treaty law that forbids weapons fire, jamming, even loud emissions. One stray harmonic ping could be construed as an attack, and the Anchorate's embargo cannons have toppled empires. Veer's crew—parolees, debt-hardened techs, and choir-dropouts signed under Indenture 7-B—learn to move like whispers.
But the Sibilant was fitted in a rush with a temperamental cantor drive. Each "drift" through subharmonic folds peels at perception: gauges hum in human voices, bulkheads throb like a heartbeat, and crew in anechoic hoods mumble melodies they swear they never learned. Lenka Sayegh hears her dead sister coming from a drain. Navigator Tannen Zed charts a course by tinnitus. Cook-bosun "Chalk" bites his tongue to check if the blood is his.
Kora-9's cathedral reefs pulse on the midnight tide. Verdigris's survivors wear mouthguards to keep words from escaping, yet the air itself vibrates with intent. The song is not merely information—it is an organism, a lattice that edits those who listen. When your shadow hums back and your bunkmate mouths someone else's lullaby, who do you believe? When Colony Sings plunges into harmonic dread, where you can't trust your own senses—and the only way home might be to join the choir.
