The Long Silence of Mimas

Forty kilometers beneath the ice, something is listening. Then the shaft collapses-and Iris Calder is trapped, alone, with the truth.Systems engineer Iris Calder took the contract for one reason: the hazard pay was enough to finally close the door on her mother's medical debt. Nine months on a Deep Frontier Resources research outpost drilling into the crater floor of Mimas, Saturn's smallest, strangest moon, was supposed to be routine-difficult, isolating, but survivable.Then the drill shaft that has spent four years reaching toward Mimas's hidden subsurface ocean tears itself apart, killing two of her crewmates and sealing her off from the rest of the station behind blast doors that were never meant to open again. With the air thinning, the hull cracking, and a corporate administrator whose calm has started to feel like something worse than grief, Iris has to keep herself and the other survivors alive using nothing but training, stubbornness, and whatever the station's damaged systems will still tell her the truth about.But the shaft didn't fail on its own. Buried in the station's logs is a directive that should never have existed-one that values a patent filing over human lives, and a twenty-two-second gap in the sensor record that only an administrator's credentials could have created. Someone on this station wanted the accident to happen. And the "rescue" ship now burning toward Herschel Station may not be coming to save anyone at all.With hours ticking down, a saboteur still walking the corridors, and proof of the most significant discovery in the history of space exploration locked in a dish nobody will let her aim at anyone who might actually listen, Iris has one chance to get the truth off Mimas before the people who buried it arrive to finish the job.The Long Silence of Mimas is a fast, character-driven survival thriller for readers who love their science fiction hard, their corporations ruthless, and their heroines resourceful under pressure. Perfect for fans of claustrophobic space survival stories, corporate-conspiracy thrillers, and first-contact mysteries that keep the science grounded and the stakes personal.If you've ever wondered what a genuine discovery might cost the people standing closest to it, Iris Calder is about to find out-forty kilometers under the ice, with the clock running and nowhere left to run.