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, “Night Watch,” follows a veteran cruise director who spots an impossible light in the night sky off another ship entirely — and wakes up the next morning to two unnervingly polite men in his office, determined to talk him out of what he saw. It’s a story about the quiet machinery that moves in to smooth over the unexplained, and one more thread tying this world’s deeper mystery together.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad / Darren Marlar"}