The galaxy screamed.
It began with flickers. Fractional delays in sovereign transaction logs. Margin discrepancies. Then, entire trade routes shuttered as if by phantom hands. Commodities surged in price. Credits turned volatile.
And then came the rumors.
Whispers of financial collapse. Of Sovereign debt imploding. Of the Accord unraveling.
In the major trading forums across the core systems, thousands of automated brokers began pulling capital—converting sovereign credits into hard resources, transferring wealth into private nodes.
"SYSTEM OVERRIDE DETECTED: LIQUIDITY LOCKDOWN ENGAGED."
It was the Panic Spiral—a cascading economic implosion engineered to destroy trust in the system Silas had spent a lifetime building.
In the Sovereign's Echo, alarms shrieked across the command deck. Zeke had sweat on his brow as he worked three separate interfaces at once.
