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, “Dead Reckoning,” follows a young navigator through an impossible pre-dawn watch — a fog radar can’t see, a GPS that jumps sixty-three miles with no explanation, and a clock that loses eleven minutes it can’t account for. It’s a story about trusting the fundamentals when the instruments stop making sense, and it belongs to the man who, years later, takes a posting aboard Atlas.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad / Darren Marlar"}