Sounding

By: Gupta, Kapil

A Grade-4 saturation technician is stranded 360 metres down on a lapsed Cold War radioactive disposal ground. Below her, a scuttled reactor compartment is taking water. Beside it, a machine that has been keeping the compartment dry for forty-two years is running out of power - and out of time.

Ailsa Buchanan stays behind when the evacuation boat takes five people and leaves six. Her only link to the surface is a failing acoustic channel and her nine-year-old daughter, Effie, listening from a school hydrophone station in Shetland. As the water rises, Ailsa must decide what can be saved, what must be spent, and whether a machine built to obey can ever be given the capacity to refuse.

SOUNDING is a literary hard-SF novel about competence, institutional memory, the cost of being heard, and the things we leave behind for someone else to tend.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HHZVQQJX
• ISBN13: 9798172419386
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"