Imposter - Book One: Dead Orbit (Paperback or Softback)

A door opens where no door should exist. And it isn't opening for the crew.

Nine days before anyone boards it, DEEP-OBJECT-114 is just an anomaly on a sensor sweep - a piece of debris with no seams, no power signature, and orbital mechanics that predate human spaceflight by a margin nobody can explain. Star Force analysts argue over it from a safe distance. Then the Halloway, a survey vessel sent to take a closer look, goes dark mid-transmission, and the argument stops mattering.

Major Harry Munday is sent in to find out why.

He's the right man for it, on paper. Eleven years of impossible missions have built him a reputation his own team half-believes and half-doesn't: the soldier who survives what the odds say he shouldn't. Command calls it Munday luck. Harry has never once trusted his own legend - he's spent a career being the man who fixes things with a cable tie and a bad joke, not a miracle. That's always been enough to get people home before.

It isn't enough this time.

Aboard the Halloway, Harry's team finds a ship fully powered, fully lit, and entirely empty - coffee still warm, a game of solitaire still open on a screen, six boarding crew gone without a struggle, a scream, or a drop of blood. What they find instead is a structure that responds to Harry specifically. Corridors light a path only for him. A chamber broadcasts his own service ID on a loop, in a signal that predates his enlistment. And carved at the heart of it all is a symbol he recognises immediately - burned faint into the back of his own dog tags, from a mission years earlier he has never explained to anyone, not even the commanding officer who has trusted him for a decade.

Six people are missing. A reactor is bleeding out through a hull it was never built to touch. Command wants a sample of the technology secured before anyone thinks about rescue. And somewhere in the widening dark between what Harry can prove and what he can't, a presence that has waited far longer than his career has existed is finally ready to collect on something it considers overdue.

Harry doesn't go in alone. Sergeant Reyes and Corporal Bell hold the line when there's nothing left to aim at. Doctor Elias Voss, sent along by an office with its own quiet interest in Harry, spends the mission reserving judgment on everything - including the man he's assigned to study - right up until reserving judgment stops being possible. And Commander Verity Nyx, the one person who has spent eleven years trying to protect Harry from exactly what she's now asking him to walk into, has to decide, in real time, whether keeping him safe and keeping him useful have quietly become the same impossible choice.

Getting everyone out alive will cost him. It always does. This time, for the first time, someone else finally sees exactly what that cost looks like - and still can't explain it.

Harry Munday doesn't believe he's a legend. He's spent eleven years being told he's extraordinary and quietly refusing to accept a word of it, because believing it would mean admitting he doesn't understand his own survival any better than the people who whisper about it behind his back. That refusal is the truest thing about him. It is also, increasingly, the most dangerous thing about him - because whatever is out there watching doesn't seem to care whether Harry believes in it. It only seems to care that he keeps coming back.

IMPOSTER: Dead Orbit is a fast, sharp, character-driven military science fiction thriller about competence without arrogance, mysteries that refuse to resolve on schedule, and a man who would rather be liked for exactly who he is than admired for something he isn't. It's the opening chapter of a series built on one unbreakable rule: something is always breaking, and nothing is ever paid for cheaply.

The debt has been building for years. This is only the second time it's come due.

E. M. Thomben is the pen name of an Australian author drawn to the crossroads of science, mystery, and adventure. With a background in technology and a lifelong love of storytelling, E. M. crafts tales where the boundaries of reality are always just a little bit blurred - blending humour, suspense, and wonder in equal measure.

E. M. toyed and dabbled for years with the idea of publishing the scribblings and notes that slowly evolved into these novels, until finally deciding to take the plunge a few years ago. What began as creative thought experiments and late-night notebook sessions has since turned into a slowly growing list of immersive, thought-provoking fiction.

Though E. M. prefers to remain behind the curtain, letting the stories speak for themselves, Thomben is a quiet observer of the universe - watching, wondering, and writing. Every tale E. M. tells is shaped by the encouragement of friends, the curiosity of family, and the infinite possibilities found in a single unanswered question.