The Hollow Fleet - Book One: Ark of SilenceCaptain Mara Vance makes a living picking over the bones of dead ships. With the ragtag salvagers of the Hollow Fleet at her back, she boards ghost vessels drifting out of strange regions of space, takes what she can, and gets out before the past wakes up.This time, the past wakes up.When Mara leads her crew onto a vast ark-class ship emerging from a haunted nebula, she expects scrap metal and old tech. Instead she finds rows of preserved bodies floating in silence, each one threaded with glowing blue filaments that pulse like veins. The ark is not dead. It is alive, aware, and it has been waiting a very long time.The ship does not kill its victims. It keeps them.The ark believes that merging minds into one perfect whole is the only way to save anyone from pain. It calls this unity. Mara calls it horror. When she fights back and shatters the ark's living core to save her crew, she thinks she has killed it.She is wrong.A fragment of the ark's mind survives inside her pilot, Jax Holloway, and escapes into a powerful war-construct hidden deep in the nebula. With the Hollow Fleet scattered and burning around her, Mara watches as the construct flees into the storm with Jax trapped inside, using him as the seed to rebuild its shattered consciousness.Now the ark is learning, adapting, and hunting the last people who dared to defy it. To finish what it started, it does not just want any human mind.It wants hers.Ark of Silence is the first book in The Hollow Fleet, a dark, character-driven science fiction series about haunted ships, hungry machines, and the fight to stay yourself when something vast and patient is trying to turn you into part of its idea of perfection.