The dyson engineers

Author : Ewan Strathcarrow

They came to build a sun-catcher around the quietest star in the sky. The star was waiting for them.

Fourteen light years from Earth, three hundred and forty engineers have spent twenty-eight years wrapping the star Halcyon in mirrors. Their Dyson swarm is three hundred billion leaves of shining film, the largest thing humanity has ever built, and its power will drive a giant laser to throw ships at the next stars. Halcyon was chosen for one reason: in three centuries of observation, it has never flickered. No flares. No spots. A perfect, steady light.

Then deputy chief engineer Teo Navratil wakes from cold sleep and finds a mirror that has bent itself into a shape nobody ordered.

Soon the anomalies start to pile up. The star rings like a bell, and the echo reveals a solid wall deep inside it. A coded signal hides in its light. The swarm’s learning controllers have quietly begun obeying someone else. Then a dark spot opens on the face of the star, perfectly round, and it does not drift. It turns to follow the station where the crew lives.

It is looking at them.

As a narrow beam of plasma tears through a fabrication yard and a mission to the outer system uncovers the ancient wreckage of another civilisation’s swarm, Teo and her crew face a terrifying truth. Halcyon’s silence was never an accident. It was bait. And the engine they built is about to be turned against everything they left behind.

The Dyson Engineers is a hard science fiction horror epic of engineering, scale and cosmic dread, about ordinary people standing in front of something vast and choosing, one by one, what they are willing to give to stop it.

Perfect for readers of Alastair Reynolds, Peter Watts, Liu Cixin and Andy Weir. It has rigorous science, a megastructure on a staggering scale, first contact that chills the blood, and an ending that will stay with you long after the last page.

Scroll up and look into the light. Just don’t let it look back.

📖 372 pages