Galactic Horrors

We Spent Six Hours At The Bottom Of The Mariana Trench. 400 Years Passed On The Surface

Nearly seven miles beneath the Pacific, a three-man submersible mapping the Mariana Trench finds what no chart has ever shown: a perfectly round shaft cut into the rock,

At The Edge Of The Solar System, We Opened An Ancient Tomb Holding Six Billion Graves

Nine hundred times farther from the Sun than Earth, a tug captain has spent nineteen years cutting comets into ice for worlds he will never see. When his engineer's scan

We Drilled Into A Lake Buried Under The Uzbek Desert. Something Has Been Waiting There Since 1977

In 1977, a Soviet water crew abandoned its drilling camp in the Uzbek desert, and the men who never came home were written off as deserters. One of them left a four-year-

A Living Alien Toured With Our Carnival For Years. Then One Night, The Visitors Came

In the spring of 1959, an autoworker out of work for eleven months takes the only job anyone will give him: driving the truck that hauls a traveling carnival's sideshow M

We Chain Men To Posts Out On The Ice Every Night. The Guns Behind Us Wait For One To Scream

For twenty winters he has built the ice at the hockey arena in his Minnesota hometown, and he can tell by sound which ice will carry a man. That is why, when the war stal

On The Gulf Coast, A Whole Town Cuts Its Power Before Nightmares Crawl Ashore

Every October, after the season's last storm, a lineman cuts the power to an entire Cajun shrimping town on the Louisiana coast for three nights. Behind drawn blinds, fam

The Most Terrifying Weapon America Ever Used

In 1968, an Air Force loadmaster has spent three years flying the war dead home from Vietnam, and his career rests on never asking what is inside a box. Moved to a night

In A West Virginia Mill City, A Reactor Explosion Slowed Time To A Crawl

When the reactor at the heart of a West Virginia mill city explodes, its night engineer runs for twenty minutes without warning anyone and reaches a fence he has never se

We Asked For Miracles On A Distant World. The Things That Delivered Them Were Not Human

A failing colony on a distant world builds its chapel around an ancient black stone, its top worn into two smooth hollows by knees no one can account for. After forty nig

At The Edge Of Human Space, The Last Garrison Has Lost Every Son It Ever Sent

Every year since Earth burned, the last human garrison at the edge of space sends its eighteen-year-old boys out in small fighting boats to strike the enemy every child a

We Found A World Where 10-Foot Giant Aliens Are Walking

On a dead world beyond the last navigation beacons, an alien city is still at work. Ten-foot beings sow fields of dust with empty hands, walk grooves their feet have worn

I Was Sent Ahead Of Everyone Into A Nightmare Forest Where The Giants Hunt

Two winters ago, something escaped from the laboratory at a secret army research station deep in the northern pines. The scientists vanished the same night. Officially, t

The Secret Cargo Moving Across America Sinks People Straight Into The Earth

Every time the truck stops, whoever is standing nearest its back doors begins to slow. Words drag. Faces sag. Then they fall flat and sink into the asphalt, and they keep

A Planet's Entire Ocean Pours Into A Bottomless Cosmic Abyss That Never Fills

For twenty-two years, an aging captain has fished the rings of a sea that drains endlessly into a vast hole past the horizon, where the catch grows richer the closer a bo

A Colony Hired Me To Dig Up Their Sleeping God

For two decades he has torn apart dead frontier colonies, and each one died of something he could dig up: a bad well, a burst dam, a hillside that came down in the dark.

For 10 Years, The Army Bombed The Aliens Underground. They Were Keeping Something Asleep

For eight years, a sapper sergeant has walked down into fresh bomb craters at first light and signed them closed. On the siege world of Bracken, six-ton spikes dropped fr

A Space Expedition Traveled Past Jupiter And Found A Wall

One January night in Nebraska, a high school science teacher watches a star slip behind Saturn's largest moon and stay lit four seconds too long. He checks his equipment

On A 300-Year Generation Ship, The Erased Population Formed A Hidden Society Of Invisible Humans

On a generation ship three hundred years from anywhere, the missing rations have an official name: spoilage. Every quarter the census office writes off a few thousand peo

Gas Miners Discovered Something Living Beneath The Saturn Storms

Saturn has no ground for twenty thousand miles. So when a helium skimmer pilot's altimeter dies mid-storm and his ship settles onto something the wind can't move, he does

An Alien Artifact Crashed On Earth. It Reconstructs Humans Into Living Nightmares

The ankle monitor says his client's leg is getting colder. Fifteen years as a county probation officer have shown him every trick for beating a bracelet, so he expects th