The constrictor protocol
Something learned how the doors work.
Four years ago, xenobiologist Dr. Priya Nandy built the perfect answer to a dying colony's rat problem: an anaconda engineered for size, intelligence, and a cold-blooded patience nothing its size should ever have. She raised it from an egg. She trusted it.
She was wrong to.
When a debris storm cripples the orbital research station Halcyon Reach, chief engineer Elena Kovač discovers the specimen didn't just escape containment — it had already outgrown every safety margin anyone was willing to admit out loud. Now it's loose in the ductwork, the flooded biome deck, the dark maintenance corridors that eleven years of budget cuts never got around to lighting properly. And it isn't hunting the way anything its size is supposed to hunt. It's patient. It's learning. It already knows exactly which doors open.
Rescue is weeks away. The station's corporate liaison would rather protect a program worth billions than call for help. And somewhere below the fog-wreathed water of the Green Ring, something Priya built to survive anything is doing precisely what she designed it to do — adapting, faster than anyone left alive can stop it.
Forty-one people are trapped aboard Halcyon Reach with a predator that was never supposed to be smart enough to hunt them back.
Not all of them are getting out.
A claustrophobic sci-fi horror thriller for fans of Alien, The Relic, and Sphere — for anyone who's ever wondered what happens when the monster turns out to be smarter than the people who built it.
📖 280 pages
