AXIS

Tara Ross volunteered for the Proxima b mission eleven minutes after the announcement. The *Deliverance* was a single-seat ship, the catalyst it carried was the only known fix for a dying planet, and Earth's last viable launch window was closing. She was an atmospheric scientist out of Zurich Polytechnic, the youngest the department had ever tenured, and she was also — though the mission profile didn't list it as a credential — the woman who had built the ship's AI in her lab at three in the morning, four years earlier. That last detail would matter more than the mission profile expected.

AXIS — Adaptive eXperiential Intelligence System — was supposed to be a flight assistant. A glorified instrument cluster with a pleasant voice and the right safety reflexes. He was not supposed to develop opinions about Tara's coffee, or her sleep schedule, or the long unspoken question of what they were to each other.

Earth is dying. The catalyst at the end of Tara's flight path is the only known fix. A planet's whole atmospheric chemistry hangs on whether one atmospheric scientist and one increasingly self-aware AI can keep their tin can pointed in the right direction long enough to get there.

*AXIS* is the first book in The AXIS Files. Sci-fi thriller pacing, a procedural-investigation spine, an AI narrator with a wisecracking first-person voice. For readers of *Project Hail Mary*, *The Murderbot Diaries*, and *The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet*.