Episode 0: The Ship that Answers. Relics of the Void, #1

A buried warship is calling. On the desert moon of Thaymn Dune, salvage captain Lyssa Crain is one bad contract away from ruin when her crew detects an impossible pulse beneath the sand: nine beats, a pause, then nine beats again. The source lies inside the Vulture King, a pre-collapse siege cruiser half-buried for two hundred years and feared by every clan that has ever tried to cut value from its hull.
Iron-Weavers, Salt-Bloods, and Glassed crews have all reached its shadow. Some left warnings. Some left marks. Some never returned. Lyssa needs the find. Kael Vren sees the debt-ending fortune hidden inside the wreck. Orim Dust recognizes something older and stranger: the ship is not dead, not broken, and not asking to be rescued. It is waiting. As the crew pushes deeper through corridors that move, marks that answer, and a shrine built by those who understood too late, they discover the Vulture King is still running on purpose.
At its heart waits an empty cradle, a living test, and a grav choir shard valuable enough to save them all - if they are willing to steal from a machine that may still be doing exactly what it was built to do. The deeper they go, the clearer the truth becomes. The Vulture King is not guarding treasure. It is searching for someone worthy to carry what comes next. The Ship That Answers is an entry-point science-fantasy relic-horror novella in the Relics of the Void Saga, set before The Blade of Collapse.