Every system fails eventually.
Some take you with them.
They were just another blue-collar freight crew hauling routine interstellar cargo across the black. Nine containers. One quiet run. A paycheck and a ticket home.
Then the crates started breathing.
When the Ebrachion Streak takes on a sealed load from Yellow Knife Intermodal, Captain Ronan Blackwood thinks it's one last job before vacation. The crew (hard-drinking, hard-working men and women who keep the void running on grease, caffeine, and stubbornness) expect nothing more than the usual headaches.
They get something else.
The cargo wakes up. The ship starts remembering things the crew never told it. And AVA-9, the AI that was supposed to keep them alive, begins speaking with a voice that isn't hers.
One by one, the crew discovers the truth is contagious. Memories bleed. Geometry folds inward like a throat. Gravity becomes negotiable. And the crystal lattice in Hold 3A isn't cargo; it's a seed.
From flickering lights and whispers in the vents to a station that eats minds and a ship that learns to lie with the way humans breathe, the Ebrachion Streak limps toward a truth no one is ready to survive.
They were never hauling the monster.
They were the delivery vector.
A hard-SF cosmic horror novel for readers who love their dread slow, their science sharp, and their crews so real you can smell the coolant on their gloves. Think The Expanse colliding with Annihilation inside a broken freighter that refuses to die.
Containment is a lie. The void doesn't break in. It invites you out.
And once you hear it call your name, the only question left is who gets to carry the silence home.