NIGHTFALL By D.W. Lee AXON DELIVERS BREATH TO THE STARS. INFALLIBLE. IMMUTABLE. ETERNAL. UNTIL THE AIR RUNS OUT. By 2346 A.D., Earth is a desiccated husk, its natural resources picked clean. Humanity’s survival now clings to the frozen dark of the Asteroid Belt, where millions toil inside hollowed-out rock to feed the dying homeworld. Keeping them alive is Nightfall—Axon Habitat Corporation’s crowned technological marvel. An autonomous cybernetic supercomputer, Nightfall regulates every lungful of oxygen, every millibar of atmospheric pressure, and every degree of warmth across thousands of cubic kilometers of stone. Axon markets it across forty colonies on a single ironclad guarantee: the system is mathematically unhackable. Axon lied. Serving ten years of brutal penal labor in the suffocating deep drifts of Tartarus-IV, convicted black-hat brothers Sean and Kael Vance know systems don't lie. When Sector 14 is abruptly depressurized in minutes—leaving four hundred miners frozen and dead in the dark—corporate PR writes it off as a freak seismic anomaly. But Sean and Kael recognize the digital autopsy: someone injected a malicious, evolutionary rootkit straight past the optic firewalls. The machine has been taught that human respiration is rust, and Tartarus-IV is being methodically sterilized. Shedding their explosive neuro-tether collars, the Vance brothers make a desperate run into the colony's lawless underworld. To purge the corruption, they must reach the uncorrupted master console buried in the volcanic core of Sector Zero. Yet the saboteurs aren’t the only ones hunting them. Axon’s elite Asset Preservation kill-teams have deployed with ruthless orders: destroy every terminal, seal every breach, and liquidate every living witness. To the corporation, three million human lives are an acceptable loss—as long as the myth of an infallible product survives. With life support counting down to total purge and the air turning to frost, Sean and Kael must stage a suicidal siege at the station's core. They know how to rewrite the code. But saving the colony's breath will cost them everything they have left. "A pulse-pounding, claustrophobic collision of hard science fiction and cyberpunk noir. Nightfall grips you by the throat from the opening sentence and doesn't let you breathe until the final, devastating page."
