The routes aren't drifting. They're being taught to lie.
With their ship barely holding together at Saints Lantern station, Rian Vale and his crew receive a cascade of distress packets from settlements across the Lantern-Verge corridor — civilian route markers shifting off published positions, live convoy traffic headed straight into the trap. What the maintenance buoys are hiding isn't sensor decay. It's Ordinate hardware designed to make a route rewrite itself from the inside.
One civilian convoy. One fractured corridor. No clean exit.
To save it, Rian has to build something he never planned: a coalition. Frontier settlements, shrine networks, Warden custodians, Velari debt-carriers, and a damaged AI with a dangerous proposal — feed the corridor a lie it will believe long enough for people to live.
Fractured Corridor is Book IV of the Starwake Saga. The relic is still awake. The empire is still filing paperwork. And the frontier is finally deciding what it's willing to become.
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
