The Worlds Beyond Witness (The Morrow Chain Saga Book 1)

Fifty years into the future of The War for the Adamite Throne, Captain Ryder McKennick commands the ICS Wayfarer Absolon, an advanced ark-class frontier seeder carrying 376 souls into the unclaimed dark of the Morrow Chain. Built for colonisation, science, and survival, the Absolon arrives at Kharon Vale expecting a difficult world. Instead, the crew discovers something far worse: a living systems-planet that thinks, reacts, and wages war through buried command architecture, signal-linked parasites, and pressure-grown war-forms.When microscopic Red Mites breach the boundaries between biology, command logic, and infection, the mission changes from settlement to survival. With the ship’s AI AEGIS, a hardened command circle, and a surface expedition forged under impossible pressure, Ryder leads the first breach into the southern root-valley, where hidden depots, siege-forms, hunter-killers, and a buried war-machine architecture reveal that Kharon Vale is not waiting to be colonised. It is already mobilised.To survive, the expedition must do more than fight. They must outthink a world. They must lie to its command systems, steal from its buried heart, and escape with knowledge before the planet learns too much about them in return.The Worlds Beyond Witness is a hard science-fiction LitRPG of first contact, interstellar colonisation, command under pressure, shipboard survival, and cosmic horror—where engineering is a weapon, intelligence is bought in blood, and the frontier is no longer empty. Read more