Downfall

Thirty years after Phoenix Requiem, the galaxy has changed tremendously. Yet, despite leaps in scientific and technological advancement, deeply inexplicable-and in some cases downright impossible-mysteries are on the rise. Even Calvin, who disappeared without a trace eight years ago-along with ship and crew-is but one more question mark and cold-case, for which not the slightest clue has ever been uncovered, by human or alien. Now, as the Empire stands terrifyingly ready, after rapid growth and relative prosperity-despite near constant war of decades-to potentially collapse into a black chaos born from betrayal, ambition, sedition, and politics, gamesmanship, conspiracy, and even war, at all levels, and from often the least likely of instigators; darker and deadlier spectres haunt the blackest space between the stars. The truly bewildering, physics-breaking, mind-bending, inexplicable and unpredictable have begun to challenge the very best of minds, and computer analyses-even artificial intelligence at its strongest performance is useless to reconcile what they witness with what is possible. None can make any consistent sense of it, and more information seems to only make the bizarre hugely stranger by the day. Now the tiny I.W.S. Sparrow, and her expert crew of science-specialized Intel Wing operators, led by Lt. Captain Tera Novak, adventurer, risk-taker, and prodigy of scientific genius-peerless in her natural gifts, must somehow make sense of the impossible, find the unfindable, explain the unexplainable, and in their efforts, as the Empire-and the Galaxy-seems ready to collapse into xenocide, war, and much worse, all around them, they tug a thread of discovery-a thread that has been dormant a very, truly long time-and learn that the answers they seek, if they exist, are even further from sentient grasp than imagined. They also learn that, if any one thing can be depended upon as truth, it is that no life, anywhere, in all the galaxy, is safe. And the da