The path to the Oort Cloud begins underground.
Can Taiyo Yamazaki break from nature’s claw to reach the stars?
A rogue planet is hurtling past the solar system. Taiyo knows how to unlock its mysteries. If he can just survive astronaut selection...
There’s a place on Earth so isolated and hostile—so alien—it's used to test and train astronauts for other worlds.
It’s where the mind fills in for the eyes; where cracks in the crew will be exposed.
Aerospace engineer Taiyo Yamazaki is determined to become Japan’s next astronaut and redefine who his country considers “real” Japanese. For the final round of selection, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) sends Taiyo and his former professor, Ronin Aro, to the Australian tropics for a cave excursion as part of an international team.
Taiyo, a rational idealist, thinks becoming an astronaut will give him credibility against allegations he illegally collaborated with China while working on his proposal for a spacecraft to observe Tabaldak, a mysterious rogue world, before it slips out of reach.
When disaster strikes, and the astronaut candidates are sealed in the cave, the excursion turns into a trial against nature’s whims, against each other, and against a creature of opportunity. Taiyo is about to learn that Earth is a hostile world. He'll need his training, science, engineering, and the raw human instinct to survive.
You'll love this near-future astronaut suspense for its realism, global intrigue, diverse characters, and unsettling themes.
Step into the void …
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There is never so quiet and eery a place on the surface of the Earth as the coast in that sliver of time between the earthquake and tsunami; just after that first aftershock but before the warning sirens begin to wail; when every person along that coast is as attuned and transfixed on their environment as a stalking predator seconds from the kill; listening, watching, waiting, because they know the retreating sea is Nature re-arming, gathering up all that fleetingly absent noise in readiness to deliver one great historic blow.
The only moments of greater silence and purgatory occur underground and in space. 550AU intertwines all three.
