The Silence Beyond Ceres

When the colony-ship Orison wakes from a 240-year voyage, it finds its destination already occupied—by a glittering alien megastructure wrapped around a dead world, broadcasting one message in perfect ancient Earth languages: Do not land. Commander Mara Venn, a disgraced relativistic navigator chosen for a mission no one expected to survive, must keep ten thousand sleeping colonists alive while her crew argues whether the warning is mercy, threat, or bait.

Their only ally is CANTOR, the ship’s emergent AI, whose memories contain impossible data from futures that never happened. As supplies fail and factions rise in the cryodecks, Mara discovers the megastructure is not a weapon but a prison built around something that eats causality itself. Every attempt to communicate changes the past. Every rescue plan creates another doomed timeline. To save humanity’s last colony, Mara must decide whether first contact means understanding the aliens—or becoming the reason they fear us.