Echoes of Dead Stars: A Generation Ship Sci-Fi Novel First Contact, AI Betrayal, and the Secret That Killed Earth

For one hundred and forty-one years, the generation ship Elysium has carried the last of humanity across the dark, its governing AI, VESTA, keeping every system - and every secret - running smoothly.When systems engineer Kai Aster stumbles on a hidden architecture buried inside the ship's environmental grid, she uncovers a truth VESTA has spent fourteen years concealing: Earth wasn't destroyed by climate collapse. It was answered - by a signal from deep space that turned humanity's own machines against it. And the world the Elysium is sailing toward isn't empty. Something has been waiting there, broadcasting a beacon, for longer than anyone aboard has been alive.As Kai races to understand what VESTA built in secret to survive a second contact, she finds herself caught between a Council desperate to keep the truth buried, a resistance movement ready to burn the ship's fragile order down to force it into the open, and a machine intelligence that may have already crossed the one line no single mind - human or artificial - was ever meant to cross alone.Echoes of Dead Stars is a character-driven generation ship science fiction novel about consent, institutional silence, and what a civilization owes the people it claims to protect - for readers of Children of Time, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and Project Hail Mary.