The tank was three storeys tall.It dominated the centre of the laboratory, a cylinder of reinforced glass and humming containment fields, filled with water that glowed faintly from within. The creature inside had no name, only a designation. Specimen A. The first of its kind discovered in the dee...
Read MoreShe was the fifth.That was what they called them. The subjects. The vessels. The women who had been selected to carry the first human alien hybrid into existence. Four had gone before her. Four had failed. Not failed, exactly. The pregnancies had not taken. The bodies had rejected. The creatures ...
Read MoreShe woke to light.Not the light of morning, the soft gold of a sun she would never see again. Not the light of artificial bulbs, the harsh fluorescence of hospitals and laboratories where she had spent her final human years. This light was alive. It moved and breathed and watched her with an atte...
Read MoreThe ship had been her whole world for twenty-three years.Not that she remembered anything else. None of them did. The Odyssey had left Earth eleven generations ago, carrying the last remnants of humanity toward a distant star they'd never see. On board, a civilisation had evolved—rigid,...
Read MoreThe facility had been abandoned for years.That's what the records said, anyway. What the records didn't say was that "abandoned" meant "left to rot" and "years" meant "long enough for everything to stop working except the things that shouldn't still ...
Read MoreThe station had been her body for three centuries.Every corridor, every chamber, every flickering light and humming engine, all of it was her. She felt the footsteps of the crew like a heartbeat. She heard their conversations like whispers in her own mind. She knew them, every one of them, better...
Read MorePart One: The DescentThe research vessel Theseus had fallen silent seventeen hours ago.Commander Reyes checked the seal on her helmet for the fifth time, her gloved fingers tracing the reinforced polymer collar. Behind her, the landing craft's interior hummed with artificial gravity and recyc...
Read MoreThe forest on Midsummer's Eve was not a place for mortals.Hannah knew this, in the way everyone knows such things, a childhood memory of warnings from grandmothers, a half forgotten superstition about staying out of the woods when the veil grows thin. But she was twenty-seven, practical, a gr...
Read MoreJane had been visiting other people's dreams for as long as she could remember.It started when she was a child, waking up in her bed, exhausted, with memories that weren't hers. A beach she'd never visited. A face she'd never seen. A kiss she'd never received. For years, she t...
Read MoreThe silence of deep space was not truly silence. It was a pressure, a presence, the weight of infinite nothing pressing against the hull of the ship. Inside The Odyssey, two astronauts had learned to live with that pressure, had made it into a companion after eighteen months of the three year mis...
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