Don't Answer the Light

By: Lorenzo Bayless Clayton

Narrated by: Karla Smith

When the Spacehawk drops onto Ganymede Mine 12-C, Team Lead, Alpha, expects a routine welfare check. Instead, she finds a dead comms grid, doors booby-trapped for overpressure, and a warning finger-scribbled on glass:

DON’T ANSWER THE LIGHT.

Jump Point Twelve is flaring—faint, wrong, and close enough to make bones hum. Inside the complex, miners whisper that the light “calls.” Outside, an unregistered tug circles like a vulture with an invoice. With a pilot who won’t abandon his bird, a captain who keeps the circle tight, and a media crew hungry for truth, Alpha has to hold Hub One, rescue who can be saved, and map the sabotage threaded through POWER and PROCESSING before the outpost turns into a transmitter.

Every corridor adds a question. Every cable has intent. And every minute, the corporate experiment that taught a building to sing grows bolder.

Taut, human, and knife-clean with its tech, Don’t Answer the Light is a near-future space thriller about quiet professionalism under impossible pressure—perfect for readers of The Expanse, Alien, and Old Man’s War who like their heroics disciplined, not loud.

©2025 Lorenzo Bayless Clayton (P)2025 Lorenzo Bayless Clayton