Two

By Steve Swaringen

A door has been opened fifty-seven light-years from Earth. Ten people walk through it. One of them is a murderer.

Humanity stands on the threshold of interstellar space. There is life out there.

Commander David Decker is pulled off his submarine without explanation and handed sealed orders, a team he has never met, and a world no human being has ever seen. Three days to establish a beachhead. Three months to learn everything they can. And one directive that makes no sense at all: tread lightly.

What they find is not the alien world anyone imagined. Grass and wildflowers. Cedar on the mountainsides. Squirrels in the trees and a bear in the orchard. A planet so much like home that half the team is convinced the whole thing is an elaborate hoax staged in a desert somewhere back on Earth.

But not everything is as it seems.

One of their number lies dead at the foot of a cliff, and it was no accident. One of them is not who he claims to be. And on the other side of the portal, a man behind a desk has decided the risks of this operation have begun to outweigh the rewards.

No communication. No supplies. No way home.

Cut off from Earth with a killer loose in the hills and the rations running out, Decker must forge a hastily assembled collection of scientists and specialists into something that can survive the winter - while the questions this world raises grow harder and harder to set aside.

What if the deepest mystery is not how life out here could be so different, but how it could be so much the same? And what if the greatest danger was never the unknown waiting on an alien world, but the evil we carried with us?

The universe is waiting. But are we ready?

Two is a first contact novel for readers who want the science to hold up and the questions to run deeper than the hardware:

Hard science fiction built on real biology and physics, and a transport technology with rules it never breaksA closed-circle murder mystery and a manhunt for a foreign agent, with no police, no courts, and nowhere to runCampfire arguments about design, evolution, and what the evidence actually shows, argued honestly from both sidesA clean read: no profanity, no explicit content, no cynicism

Complete in itself, Two is the first book of the Benignitas series.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0999095803
• ISBN13: 9780999095805
• Release Date: July 2017
• Publisher: Spears & Cornelius
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"