When Earth collapses, a desperate colonisation mission carries humanity’s last hope across the void. Among the crew is Ye-Min, the mission’s astronomer — and the first to understand that the new world is not empty.
Waiting for them is an apex species: chemically powerful, alien, humane in its own logic, and intelligent enough to recognise humans as an existential threat. Their response is decisive. The crew’s minds are reduced to primitive instinct and manipulated into a tribal existence where they worship a false god they call Hexibarber.
As weather shifts violently and hidden forces move in the dark, Ye-Min — newly awakened and fighting to reclaim her intelligence — begins to uncover a larger design: abandoned machines acting strangely, unexplained experiments in hidden places, and a native species preparing a future in which humans may have a role… or become prey.
To survive, Ye-Min must navigate a world shaped by the Alloy, a universal element binding life, memory, and physics itself.
Peter Barrett - Pen name: Beraud Rock, was born and grew up on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. He has spent a lifetime reading Evolutionary Science, Science Fiction, History, and comics as a child. He was not exposed to television until age eleven.
Peter has a fascination and passion for the natural world and our place in the Universe. Peter's world changed he day he examined tiny insects through his photographic lens and discovered their beauty and makeup. He is equally fascinated by the human animal, their degrees of humanity, the complexities of society and the future of the human race. Themes in his writing include Artificial Intelligence, sentience, problem-solving, disaster, and the evolutionary timeline and makeup of life on Earth.
He holds two University degrees, neither of which is related to his previous careers as a Cook, Photographic Technician, and Ophthalmic Technician. When not writing, he spends time with his partner, his chickens (Chooks, as Australians say), wildlife, and grows his own food.