ASTROFALL

A Galactic Ultimatum Space Thriller. One year after Continuity Day was suspended, Dorian Veyne is the most wanted man in human space. The Consortium has renamed its near catastrophe a managed schedule, and it is spending the time Dorian bought faster than anyone admits. The lock he built has ninety days left. The only ally he ever trusted is the thing holding it shut, and she is running out of herself. Then a ship arrives from beyond the Net, from a coalition of species that has already watched stars fall. Its Witness asks for Dorian by name and brings an ultimatum: close the throat, or the Collective will still it for him. Closing it would end the Echo, and it would leave fifty billion people with no way off the habitats failing around them. Dorian has a third plan, and it is the worst one anyone has had. He will walk into the Echo on purpose, through a keyhole only his own voice can open, to find the pieces of himself that went in before him and learn what the hungry dead are really heading toward. Down there, the clock does not run the way it does at home. Every hour he spends in the dark costs days above, where a fleet is charging, a captain is refusing an order, and a woman with a clipboard is counting his heartbeat toward the number at which she will pull him out. The Authority wants him back in a pod. The Collective wants the door shut. The remnants want to be finished. And the part of Dorian that never could leave a sum unfinished is waiting for him at the bottom of the stack. Once you go in, you do not always come out the same.