Older Than the Empire

The alarm hit Joas before he was awake.

CODE RED: PROXIMITY ALERT — UNIDENTIFIED VESSEL — COLLISION COURSE.

The ship’s voice cut through the dark flat and absolute, no urgency in the tone because urgency had been engineered out of it, replaced with something worse. Certainty. Nine months of running had wired something into Joas that responded before his mind caught up with what was happening. He crossed the dark cabin without needing light. His hand found the energy pistol from the holster mounted beside his bunk. The well-worn black leather topcoat came off its hook beside the bunk and settled across his shoulders in one motion. By the time the second klaxon cycle completed he was moving.

Some people are born with their eyes already pointed at the horizon. JT Caine is one of them, the kind who writes the science fiction he has always wanted to find: vast in scope, grounded in loss, and driven by the oldest human question: what lies beyond the edge of everything we know?

He lives in Canada. Older Than the Empire is his debut novel.