On the maiden voyage of the MV Atlas, the world’s largest cruise ship, a ghost operative team attempts a silent extraction of a high-value defector carrying an impossible secret: an ancient, non-human artifact. Hidden amongst twenty-two thousand passengers and stalked by an elite foreign intelligence network, the team must execute a precise, high-stakes tradecraft operation in international waters — one wrong move could blow their cover and trigger a confrontation that could break the global order.
Our companion short story, “The Man at the Table,” follows a different operative entirely as he breaks into an empty house chasing a routine surveillance lead — and finds something waiting for him that no training could have prepared him for. It’s a quieter, stranger thread in this world, and one that’s far from finished.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad / Darren Marlar"}