The Flight of Anabasis

Synopsis

At the end of the solar system, where the Sun's barely a star among the blackness, the merchant ship Anabasis accepts an order far too well paid to be innocent: to collect some supposed geological samples onto Kuiper's belt and come back with no questions. Kael Morrow, Captain of the ship and former Martian soldier, knows the price of curiosity. That's why she doesn't open the cargo seals. That's why she's following his path. That's why when instruments start to register an impossible interference, it's too late. One by one, the crew of Anabasis start to change. Bek Sou stops answering and remains motionless, looking at an direction that nobody else can see. Liss Varma writes mathematical symbols that she doesn't remember drawing. Orin Tach leaves his ship's controls, convinced that his path's hidden something that isn't at his coordinates. Draven Cole resists not by understanding but because his older instinct tells him to hit before looking too much. And Kael, rather than sink as others, begins to see patterns with a clarity that doesn't belong to him. What seemed to be a mere commercial transport appears as a carefully prepared trap. The client doesn't exist. The name of the contract belongs to a dead man. The load contains no samples but calibrated sensors to record a concrete frequency. Someone sent the Anabasis to the brink of something that humanity shouldn't have found. The flight of the Anabasis opens The call of Tanit with an intimate tragedy amidst the void: five crew members, an old ship, an impossible coordinate and a silent cylinder, older than the solar system, that doesn't attack, doesn't speak and doesn't threaten. Just hold up. And those who come up to TANIT are no longer the same.