Dust
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For Flight Engineer Cynthia Han and her fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 81 has proved as mundane as space travel ever gets.
Yes, this would be CynthiaтАЩs final NASA mission, for reasons she has so far kept from the rest of the crew; and yes, the latest billionaire тАЬspace touristтАЭ has managed to irritate everyone on board. Still, none of them could have asked for a smoother experience.
Until the morning they wake up to silence. All communication with Earth, gone. From half a dozen different agencies with multiple installations and redundancies across the globe, there is simply... nothing.
And through the viewports of the ISS, only the thick veil of churning, lightning-veined dust to suggest the Earth remains at all.
Now, without ground control, without the proper telemetries or calculations or even reliable visuals, Cynthia and the rest of Expedition 81 must make their way home. For most, it will be the most fraught and the most frightening task of their lives.
But it will be nothing compared to the world that now awaits them beyond the dust.
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Ari Marmell writes novels, short stories, feature scripts, role-playing games, and video gamesтАФall of which he enjoyed in lieu of schoolwork when growing up. He is the author of the Mick Oberon gangland-fantasy-detective series, the Widdershins YA fantasy series, The Goblin Corps, and many others.
Cindy Kay is a Chinese-Thai-American narrator and educator who grew up in the California Bay Area and lives in the Rockies. Her work has been described as listening to a "cozy best friend." She narrates fiction and nonfiction, and has studied Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and Japanese.
