Space Rats: Book One: The Untouching
IT IS THE TWENTIETH YEAR OF THE SILENCE.
For five thousand years the Great Cog turned. Then it stopped.
Not by war. Not by judgment. By hunger.
Deep inside Scrappa-7 - two kilometres of welded scrap grown into a cathedral - seven starving guilds have spent twenty years building religions, ledgers, and wars on top of that silence.
Toast feeds crumbs to a valve and calls it prayer. Ledger denies the repair forms and calls it mercy. Wire profits from the dark and calls it business.
Pip is three feet tall, born after the THOOM died, and the only rat in the cathedral who doesn't carry the phantom knock in his chest. While the Heavy-Feet flinch at a heartbeat that isn't there, he's been quietly doing what no guild has managed: mapping the whole dying world, one duct at a time.
His gauge says thirty-four.
Down from thirty-six.
Five years left, maybe less.
And the oldest surviving instruction in the Forge Manual is very clear:
DO NOT PLACE FOREIGN OBJECTS IN THE GEAR TEETH. SERIOUSLY.
Pip decides the first useful thing anyone has done in twenty years might be to find out why.
He goes to look behind the iron.
SPACE RATS: BOOK ONE - THE UNTOUCHING is a darkly funny, unapologetically grim science-fiction fable about faith, bureaucracy, inherited fear, and what happens when one very small rat finally asks the question everyone else built a civilisation around avoiding.
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