The colony ship was supposed to land on an open plain near the equator. Instead, Dr. Ava Reyes wakes up alone in a bioluminescent alien jungle on the wrong continent.
Her system interface -- a neural implant designed to support colonization -- is damaged. It scans resources but glitches. It unlocks blueprints but locks others behind objectives that shouldn't exist. And sometimes it flashes warnings in corrupted text before snapping back to normal.
Ava is a xenobiologist. She signed up to study alien life, not to survive it. But biology is survival, and she has thirty days to build shelter, find drinkable water, and figure out which of the glowing things in this jungle will feed her and which will dissolve her from the inside.
On Day 22, she finds Tomas -- a structural engineer trapped in wreckage. Together they stop surviving and start building: a real base with walls, a water purifier, a garden of alien plants that might not kill them.
But the bioluminescent fungal network blanketing the jungle floor is more than it seems. Ava's scanner picks up patterns in it. Structures. Signals. Something that looks a lot like intelligence.
And then the things watching them from the treeline step into the light.
Note: This book was written with AI assistance. The worlds, systems, characters, and story are the author's.
Genre: Science Fiction
Her system interface -- a neural implant designed to support colonization -- is damaged. It scans resources but glitches. It unlocks blueprints but locks others behind objectives that shouldn't exist. And sometimes it flashes warnings in corrupted text before snapping back to normal.
Ava is a xenobiologist. She signed up to study alien life, not to survive it. But biology is survival, and she has thirty days to build shelter, find drinkable water, and figure out which of the glowing things in this jungle will feed her and which will dissolve her from the inside.
On Day 22, she finds Tomas -- a structural engineer trapped in wreckage. Together they stop surviving and start building: a real base with walls, a water purifier, a garden of alien plants that might not kill them.
But the bioluminescent fungal network blanketing the jungle floor is more than it seems. Ava's scanner picks up patterns in it. Structures. Signals. Something that looks a lot like intelligence.
And then the things watching them from the treeline step into the light.
Note: This book was written with AI assistance. The worlds, systems, characters, and story are the author's.
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Dominic Hale's Colony Zero