The Shadow of Fobos

Synopsis

After surviving the cursed flight of Anabasis, Kael Morrow reached Fobos with three dead, a marked ship and an unbearable certainty: what destroyed his crew was no accident. Someone deliberately sent them to the border of TANIT, the impossible cylinder hidden in Kuiper's belt, and used his ship as an instrument to measure a frequency that no human being should have heard. At the dark levels of Fobos, between black markets, without cameras and pacts that are paid with silence, Kael finds out that she isn't alone. A secret organization called The Circle has been monitoring TANIT's effects for decades and has a name for what happened to his crew: Marking. The others have collapsed. Kael computed. And that difference makes it something more valuable than the data she brought back. Draven Cole, also marked his way, understands before anyone that there's no more a clear exit. He doesn't ask, doesn't seek consolation and doesn't believe in the promise of the Circle, but he knows that he will not leave Kael. Meanwhile, far from Fobos, the secret war begins to show his teeth: in New Geneva, Asha Okafor detects Vendetta's movements at the Senate about Jupiter's contracts and at Kronos, Director Maris Oduya finds that H3D keeps archives about TANIT far before his supposed official discovery. The Shadow of Fobos expands Tanit's call from the inner horror of Anabasis to an interplanetary conspiracy where corporations, governments, power sects and clandestine organizations compete to control a truth far too old to belong to anyone. TANIT remains silent in the outside darkness but its effects are already spread by Fobos, New Geneva and the Juba orbit. The Marking doesn't go away. And people who survive her soon discover that there's something worse than being touched by TANIT: to be found by those who have been waiting for them for decades.