Echo: Directive

Echo: Directive. A 105,000-word space opera with strong found family dynamics. The story starts with Caelis, a sniper who ends humanity’s worst civil war by refusing to kill the woman in his scope. That one choice costs his side everything.

After the war, as Caelis drifts through a refugee camp without purpose, until he crosses paths with Serenya, the woman he spared. She doesn’t know who he is—only that he’s carrying grief too. She convinces him to follow her, and to his own surprise…he agrees.

They get pulled into a simple supply mission to a moon colony along with a snippy medic and a jittery pilot. But, the mission takes a dark turn when they discover that everything living has been erased from the colony, overwritten by an alien signal that’s now targeting them.

To survive they’ll have to find an abandoned prototype ship, bond with an AI child who’s terrified of herself, and figure out a way to stop the signal. And Caelis has to do all of that without Serenya learning the truth: that he was the one sent to kill her.

It’s Mass Effect meets This Is How You Lose the Time War—a story about grief, intimacy, and what it means to find your people when the world is falling apart.