Someone had put it there. Something that was no longer around to maintain its work.
Vast angular formations of unknown material, drifting beyond the inner edge of the heliopause.
Shedding exotic radiation the way a burning building sheds embers.
Except that the building was the size of a small moon.
Three years since confirmation.
One year until launch.
Kilometers of built structure, decaying in a way no natural object should.
The official reports call it the Structure, as though the existential crisis could be kept inside a labeled file. It sheds gravitational distortions and pulses of exotic radiation, and nobody knows who built it.
Given ten to fifteen years of unchecked drift, the embers will reach Earth.
A Lumina-class vessel, two hundred thousand tons of experimental propulsion and optimistic engineering, rising in its cradle above the planet. A hundred and fifty people have signed away the next decade of their lives to crew it.
“It’s not one thing that went wrong. It’s one thing that was done. To all of it. At once.”
A drone drifts off its flight path and punches through the Spillway’s hull. The station’s AI reports that everything is fine. Someone who knows the station specifically has decided the ship must never leave.
Beneath it all sits a locked archive with a scrubbed designation, older than the Spillway itself: Project Erebus.
Without the relay, the mission didn’t have a safety net. It had a one-way door.
Procedural. She notes the fear, files it, sets it aside for later.
Ten years was the number, and he had stopped flinching at it.
Avoidant. A father rehearsing a sentence he can’t make true.
I risk them being alive and inconvenienced rather than the alternative.
Command. He knows the difference between a fact and a direction.
Ten years is my whole life all over again.
Precise. Her anger is contained until it becomes something denser.
This is what evolutionary pressure looks like from the inside. Uncomfortable. Instructive.
Patient. He built something to listen, and he has more time than you.
Experimental propulsion, VASIMR engines, one untested design.
People who chose the same strange life, and so are bound up in each other.
Phased cryogenic intervals. At a kitchen table, it just means “gone.”
It was sending for decades before anyone could hear it properly.
Debut
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A dark Celtic portal fantasy that crosses from modern Dublin and Pittsburgh into Éironda, the otherworld, where Aidan Corbin and Michael Hornsby are bound to a blade that should have stayed buried.
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Book One of The Nemesis Project. An engineer, a father, a general and a fifteen-year-old face a sabotaged launch and a signal that has been waiting for decades.
January 2027
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A new literary science fiction novel, arriving in January. The synopsis and exact release date will go to the mailing list first.
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