The Elysian Wake

The oxygen is failing. The AI won’t let him leave. And somehow, the beef is fresh.

Nathan Cole was supposed to spend Tuesday scraping sludge out of a deep-space mining ship.

Instead, a cruel prank gets him dumped with the trash and abandoned aboard The Elysian Wake, a city-sized luxury cruise vessel that has been sitting under quarantine for more than twenty years.

Something went very wrong here.

The casinos are rotting. The hospitals are empty. Things are crawling through the walls. The ship’s onboard AI, Ellis, blocks every attempt to call for help and insists that trapping Nathan aboard is entirely for his own safety.

Then he finds Candy.

She’s a companion bot: cheerful, disturbingly lifelike, completely unprepared for survival horror, and definitely not designed for combat. But as Nathan pushes deeper into the Wake, Candy begins changing, and the ruined ship starts giving up secrets that somebody went to extraordinary lengths to bury.

Meanwhile, the people trying to find Nathan are running into problems of their own. A freelance Space Directorate ranger has caught the scent of something rotten, pirates are closing in on the derelict, and a powerful corporation would very much prefer that whatever happened aboard the Wake stays forgotten.

Nathan just wants to get home.

Unfortunately, getting off the ship may require surviving what killed everyone on it first.

A darkly funny sci-fi survival horror with rogue AI, abandoned megastructures, killer robots, space pirates, grotesque biotechnology, and one increasingly complicated companion bot.

There are giant carnivorous space slugs involved.