After the sun went dark

There is no explosion. No flare. No warning. In a single heartbeat the light stops reaching Earth, and within hours the temperature begins to fall.

Dr Ava Mercer is seven hours into a night shift on Mauna Kea when the first message arrives from her twelve-year-old daughter in Colorado. By dawn she has established the one fact that will define the rest of human history: the Sun has not died. The neutrino flux is unchanged. The star is burning exactly as it always has.

Something four million kilometres wide has been placed in front of it. And the edge of that something bends starlight like a manufactured grating.

As the grids fail and the oceans give up the last of their stored summer, Ava joins a desperate international expedition to an abandoned observatory a million and a half kilometres out — the only instrument humanity ever built that might see what is really happening. Getting there means two thousand kilometres of frozen steppe, three armies at a single launch pad, a warhead package already aimed at the object, and a crew who all know the arithmetic of their own consumables.

What waits at the observatory is not an attack.

It is a decision — taken a very long time ago, by something that has done this one thousand three hundred and forty-six times before, and got it wrong exactly once.  "We covered your star in every direction from which it could be heard. Your world stands behind one of the covers. This was not chosen."

Short version, for ads: The Sun didn't die. Something put a lid on it — and it isn't there for us.

📖 209 pages