The Static Gods

They didn't just wake up an alien parasite. They woke up a monument. Duke Ward is a deep-void hazardous environment remover—a blue-collar fixer who wades into dead space stations and cleans up the mess. But Outpost Ouroboros isn't just a compromised rig. The station's drill team struck a 400-million-year-old megastructure, awakening an ancient intelligence known as the Static. The Static isn't a weapon, and it doesn't want to destroy. It wants to preserve. It archives civilizations by perfectly freezing them in a horrifying fusion of biology and crystalline machinery. Now, the crew of Ouroboros has been transformed into a twisted, interconnected choir of "Husks," and the megastructure is spooling up a broadcast to offer its eternal stasis to Earth. Infected by the creeping alien lattice and fighting against a system that wants to rewrite his nervous system into a masterpiece, Duke has to navigate the crumbling station to reach the Focal Node. He doesn't have an army. He doesn't have a grand destiny. What he has is a fifty-pound hydraulic shear, a plasma-arc welder, and fourteen years of experience dismantling things that are trying to kill him. The Static Gods is a high-octane blend of cosmic horror and gritty science fiction. It's a story about the messy, chaotic beauty of entropy, and a fixer who knows that sometimes the only way to save the universe is to break the machine.