i see you
leave me alone
Dead Silence is a 2022 Sci-Fi Horror and mystery book by S. A. Barnes.
In a Used Future where her job as comm relay repairwoman is about to be replaced by telepresence drones, Claire Kovalic is fighting despair over never being able to travel to space again. It's during their last mission that she and her crew pick up a faint Distress Signal, for the most famous— or rather, infamous missing ship in space travel history: the Aurora. A luxury liner for the top of the 1%, with every luxury imaginable. Filled with royalty, tech billionaires, athletes and Reality TV stars, all disappeared without a trace over twenty years ago.
Exploring, they find more questions than answers for the tragedy onboard. Scenes of luxury and decadence intermixed with senseless death and brutality. With the possibility of becoming billionaires thanks to salvage rights winning out over a growing sense of dread, the crew decides to navigate the ship back into communications range to force the ship's owners to recognize their claim. They soon wish they hadn't.
Not to be confused with the 2007 film.
This work contains examples of:
- Abandon Ship: Or at least attempted. The passengers tried to get away in the Escape Pods, but most were improperly activated, leading to some not unlatching from the ship and burning against the hull. Claire thinks any that did detach correctly died of starvation or hypothermia long ago.
- Apocalyptic Log: Averted. Everything aboard the Aurora was absolutely normal until it wasn't. The closest it gets is when Nysus finds a tablet with unaired episodes and raw footage of the Dunleavys. The unaired episodes are normal, even funny. The unedited footage is Shaky Cam of the passengers going crazy, with no explanations given.
- Book Ends: The story begins with Claire entertaining suicial thoughts, briefly in a trance about throwing herself from her tether to the LINA into space so she doesn't have to come back to Earth. In the ending, she is thrown into space again, tethered to the LINA, but she realises she no longer wants to die like this, and fights to return to Kane.
- Big Bad Friend: Max, who seems to be the one person in Verux on Claire's side and willing to accept her story, is actually leading the mission into destroying the Aurora and evidences of Verux's wrongdoing, and using Claire as the Fall Guy.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The earplugs in the first officer's ears. He was aware of what was really happening in the Aurora. While not 100% efficient, they help ease the effects of the MAW and are useful for Kane to survive months in the Aurora.
- The sound dampeners working on 100% capacity. The cause of the madness was a sonic weapon working in subaudible frequencies. The sound dampeners themselves were reducing the effects of the MAW, and Claire turning them off in the end gets her rid of almost all the mercenaries in her way when they're the unrestrained effect of the weapon.
- The Mira shipment in the Aurora, meant to be taken to a Verux colony and the heightened energy consumption on the ship. Said shipments were actually the weapon used in it, and the energy consumption came from the activation of it.
- The emergency beacon that Nysus asks Claire to retrieve and the salvagers mentioned when discussing leaving the Aurora behind. At the very end of the novel, Claire and Kane manage to use that to ask for help of salvagers and survive.
- Choosing Death: Various times, most notably the Aurora's XO shot himself in the temple, finding a loose noose floating in zero-G, and an occupied noose with the body floating in zero-G.
- Closed Circle: The Versailles Contingency was designed to close the bunker section from would be rioters and mutineers, and could only be opened from the outside— and soon, this becomes a problem.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Played straight and averted. Junior exec Reed is more interested in a promotion via "proving" Claire killed her crew. Max averts this by being the one Verrux executive who is supportive and cares for her. Later on it's double subverted, Max is perfectly willing to use Claired as a catspaw in the Aurora disaster coverup.
- Cool Boat: The Aurora is a luxury liner shaped space ship, done for the purpose of enticing the extremely wealthy and create a sense of familiarity. It was loaded down with every extravagance and show of luxury: an infinity pool, theater, mall, and massive "glass" viewport across the bow.
- Couldn't Find a Pen: Messages around the Aurora are written in blood on the walls.
- Destroy the Evidence: What Verux attempts to do to the Aurora— and Claire— to cover up their use of a prototype sonic weapon.
- On a smaller scale but no less tragic scale, Verux did everything possible to hide how their negligence lead to the death of everyone but Claire in her Mars colony due to faulty air filters, improperly sterilized soil, delays on replacement air filters and on sending a rescue party. About the only halfway decent thing they did was raise Claire and protect her identity from the media.
- Distracted by the Luxury: Of the Aurora. At one point Lourdes and Claire almost sink into the bed of a first class cabin, noting it's softer than anything either had ever felt.
- Distress Signal: The comm buoy that initially draws everyone in.
- Repeated later, when Kane creates a new one once they get the Aurora moving again.
- Eat the Rich: The "Versailles Contingency" is an explicit countermeasure to this. Even in a ship of the ultra-wealthy, the designers built in a separate section as a bunker in case of a mutiny.
- Eye Scream: When attacked by a psychotic Reed, Claire defends herself with a screwdriver. Because they're in the dark, she can't aim right, but when he appears, she realizes she has mauled his eye, having cut one of his eyeballs in the middle and leaving his lid like a ruined curtain hanging above it.
- Fall Guy: Claire is taken back to the Aurora under the pretenses that her experience can help them survive. She was actually being taken there to die and take the blame for the planned explosion that will kill everyone aboard and destroy evidence.
- Five-Man Band: The crew of the LINA.
- Claire: The Leader and an introvert.
- Kane: The Medic and mechanic, doubling as XO and The Lancer.
- Lourdes: The Heart and communications specialist. She's interested in bringing the Aurora back for the sake of the families of the deceased.
- Voller: Commander Contrarian and Jerkass pilot.
- Nysus: The Smart Guy and geek.
- Entitled Bastard: Reed, who shamelessly flaunts and uses his father's status as a high ranking executive in Verux to try and intimidate people or get favors. More specifically, he seems to feel entitled to and deserving of Claire confessing to a crime she didn't commit simply because it serves his agenda. When he, Claire and Kane are left to die on the ship, he fully expects to be able to buy the loyalty of the soldiers (and when that doesn't work) have Claire's help.
- Ghost Ship: The Aurora.
- Gone Horribly Right: Verux just wanted to cause bad press for CitiFutura with the MAW device inducing headaches and nausea among the wealthy passengers. Instead, interactions with the state of the art hull alloys amplified the power of the device and caused mass panic and hysteria, along with paranoia, suicides and homicidal rage.
- Hallucinations: And hearing things. The passengers of the Aurora and crew of the LINA start witnessing visions of dead and living people aboard the ship.
- Haunted House Historian: Nysus, he was both interested in the Aurora before the find, and afterwards downloads the entire online Forum "database" on it for ease of reference.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The plan to bring Claire back as the Fall Guy for the destruction of the Aurora is what dooms Max. Once realizing his plans, she cranks the power of the MAW which makes almost all of his mercenaries die and turns Reed into a psychotic wild card, ultimately resulting in Claire killing Max and surviving with Kane to tell the truth about Verux and the Aurora.
- I See Dead People: Combined with Hallucinations. Those aboard the Aurora start witnessing the dead and the living— who are not onboard.
- And Claire herself has had lifelong "hallucinations" of the dead, even before the accident on Mars that killed her everyone else in her colony.
- Late to the Tragedy: The LINA crew while visiting to the Aurora.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Are Claire's hallucinations just that, or does she see ghosts? She seems to think so, given her mother's ghost talked her through using complex communication equipment when she was a child to get help. On the other, she was isolated for over a month with dozens of corpses. Later on, she speculated that the device Verux used to sabotage the Aurora was somehow amplifying or even destabilizing her abilities, allowing her some Postcognition. Claire herself finds herself somewhere in the middle, under the assumption that she can see dead people, and both Becca and her mother are really ghosts that appear to her, but that she is also under the influence of the MAW and at least some of what she sees are hallucinations induced by it. The story gives credence to the supernatural considering the first ghost Claire sees happens before the traumatic event, her explanation that she couldn't have known how to operate the comms that saved her as a child, and that she can see the ghost of a mercenary named McCaughey, someone she never met or heard of, but that another mercenary, Diaz, confirms to have existed and died.
- MegaCorp: Verux, and the builders of the Aurora, CitiFutura.
- Reality TV: There are three influencers aboard the Aurora with a passing similarity to the Kardashians, with the show "Doing it Dunleavy Style", with the Dunleavy sisters and the matriarch.
- Sonic Stunner: The MAW device was originally meant to be only this, with applications in crowd dispersal and causing mild discomfort at low settings. Cue Gone Horribly Right, when it causes mass hallucinations and violent tendencies.
- Stalker with a Crush: One of the passengers, Opal Dunleavy, apparently had a restraining order placed on her by another passenger before boarding, Linx. It's not a stretch to imagine part of the reason she wanted to board was for the drama, ratings, and being near him. She jokes that it no longer applies now that they're in space.
- Suicide Mission: The team Verux assembles to return to the Aurora seems unusually grim, and Claire speculates they are all being ordered to go. Turns out they are all being paid handsomely to die aboard the Aurora— or rather, their families will be. Verux needs there to be a body count in order to give credence to the story of Claire going crazy and causing an engine explosion.
- Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: The Tower of Peace and Harmony, a Verux run psychiatric hospital that while not Bedlam House levels of bad, no one ever leaves. It's filled with the traumatized, broken people who suffered accidents while working for Verux.
- Time Skip: Twice, part of the story follows Claire and her team in the past, and the other is Claire recounting the disaster from a psychiatric institution, her crew presumed dead.
