VELORA

Beneath twenty kilometres of ice, the humans may be the strangest bodies in the ocean.

On the moon Velora, Deepwell’s instruments keep detecting something beyond the hull: living sources that circle the installation, alter their electrical signals and return after the research vehicles pass.

Instrument specialist Irena Bratek refuses to call them ghosts. Biologist Hyejin Seo believes they may be capable of communication. Station chief Bastien Lenoir needs to keep fifty people alive in a place where a damaged seal or failed power system can end the mission.

When an attempt to quiet the station injures one of the creatures, their disagreement becomes an obligation. The scarred individual they call Seven keeps returning. But two frequencies are not necessarily two voices, an approach is not necessarily consent, and a repeated pattern is not yet a language.

As equipment fails and the station’s position proves increasingly disruptive, Irena and her colleagues must build a safer way to listen—and move their home out of a passage they once believed was empty.

They have two research vehicles, limited reserves and no repair team coming in time to make the decisions for them. What they do next will shape both their survival and a relationship whose meaning they can only begin to understand.

Velora is a standalone science-fiction novel of subsurface exploration, difficult choices and first contact with an unfamiliar life.