Deckhand Zero and the Bycatch
A Far-Future Fishing Fleet Thriller

About this book:

Three miles down, the *Nereus-9* drags the abyssal plain for Oceanis-Corp, a five-kilometer factory ship that turns trench-life into protein paste for the core colonies. Silas Vance is Deckhand Zero—no certifications, no equity, no recourse. He scrubs the bilge grates the drones won't touch, hauls the sludge the macerators choke on, and keeps his head down. But Haul Seventy-Four doesn't belong in the nets. Forty-two thousand tons of deep-sea biomass come up knitted together by a pale, fibrous web that pulses with violet light, fuses with flesh, and sings a note that vibrates in the bones. When corporate security seals the deck and cuts a glowing sample loose with a hull-saw, the fluid that sprays out doesn't just melt steel—it rewrites it.

Silas pockets the only evidence: a single drop of iridescent oil on his knife tip. Now the lowest hand on the ship carries the highest-value secret in the fleet. The Auditor wants it contained. The Captain wants the quota met. The thing in the net wants something else entirely—and it's already loose in the bilge, rewriting the ship from the inside out. Between the crushing pressure outside the hull and the corporate guns inside, Silas has one shift to decide what he's willing to become to survive what's rising from the trench.

*Deckhand Zero and the Bycatch* is a claustrophobic far-future thriller where *The Thing* meets *Leviathan* on an industrial scale—gritty, visceral, and paced like a winch cable snapping under forty thousand tons of something that refuses to die.