The dead worlds aren't staying dead.
Rian Vale and his crew reach Vigils End — a quarantined, ash-gray world with a waking alien relay buried under its equatorial scar — only to find the Ordinate already drilling and the Triarchy already building a case file. Two empires. One site. And a network that stopped being local the moment it started answering.
When a memory shard from the vault writes itself through Rian's hands, what he finds isn't system failure. It's a signature — the same deliberate wound, repeated across dozens of worlds, engineered to look like ordinary collapse.
The Fenru network didn't die. It was made to die.
Extinction Margin is Book III of the Starwake Saga — a space opera about a crew with a broken ship, a damaged AI that knows more than it should, and a discovery too large to run from. The chain is visible. The relay is live. And someone built all of this to make sure no one survived long enough to compare notes.
Cohl Marten writes science fiction built on one principle: every decision has a cost, and someone pays it. His work explores crews navigating unstable routes, damaged infrastructure, and systems that no longer behave the way they were designed to. With a focus on logistics, consequence, and human judgment under pressure, his stories replace spectacle with structure—and let the outcomes speak.View all by Cohl Marten
