The Guttered Dark

Mace Corvin has run the same gate routes for twenty-one years. He knows the corridors, the timings, the coffee machines on every dock. He knows exactly what a standard transit feels like.This one doesn't feel standard.When his heavy hauler, the Ulysses Compact, enters Gate Seven on a routine cargo run, it doesn't come out the other side. Not where it's supposed to, anyway. Instead, Mace finds himself adrift in an alien starfield no navigation chart has ever mapped — a place gate technicians whisper about in maintenance logs and retirement bars. A place called the Fold.He's not alone. A retired gate technician with dangerous secrets has bought passage on his ship. A xenobiologist has stowed away in his cargo hold. And somewhere in his sealed containers, something is waking up.The Fold is not empty space. It never was. The things that live here have had two hundred years of gate transits to learn what warm-blooded creatures look like — and what they taste like. Now, with a damaged ship, no rescue signal, and a graveyard of eighteen vessels drifting twenty kilometers off the bow, Mace has one shot to repair his drive, build a beacon from salvaged parts, and find a way home before the dark finds them first.The Guttered Dark is a pulse-hammering deep-space horror novel about survival, institutional corruption, and the terrifying possibility that the universe's most extraordinary life forms have been living in the cracks between our stars all along — watching every ship that passes through.For fans of Alien, The Expanse, and Dead Space.

📖 215 pages