The farside hull

Nineteen years ago, a private colony ship vanished without a trace, and the company that built it made sure the world forgot it ever existed.

Lunar surveyor Sera Okonkwo-Lindqvist isn't looking for it. She's eleven months into a contract that's supposed to be the dull kind — ice deposits, regolith density, a paycheck and nothing else. Then a routine radar pass over the Moon's farside finds something with no business existing: an eleven-hundred-meter hull, holding orbit, full of warmth.

Forty-one colonists launched aboard Solveig's Promise. Forty are logged dead, one accident at a time, over a single careful, fourteen-month killing spree. The fortieth death reads like a heroic sacrifice. The plaque outside the bridge says so. The truth is mounted at a height meant for someone taller than the woman it honors.

And something aboard the ship is still warm. Still listening. Still, impossibly, talking back.

As Sera and her three-person crew go deeper into a vessel that has spent nineteen years quietly becoming something else, they find a chief engineer's confession recorded in a voice too calm for what it's confessing to, a substrate that grows through dead tissue like it's looking for a use for it, and a promise — Solveig's Promise — that one man decided he was the only person entitled to keep.

He doesn't think he's a murderer. He thinks he's found the only honest mercy there is. And he's very patient, and very reasonable, and he's had nineteen years alone to get good at sounding like he's right.

The Farside Hull is a slow-burn science fiction horror novel about the distance between a calm voice and a kind one — about institutions that build the dark rather than the deed, and about how long it takes to notice that the gentlest person in the room has been the most dangerous one the entire time. For readers of cosmic dread that earns its scares through patience rather than jump scares, and for anyone who's wondered exactly how a good man convinces himself that taking someone's choice away is the same thing as saving them.

The ship is still out there. It's been waiting nineteen years for someone to come close enough to ask it the right questions.

It already has the answers ready.

📖 170 pages