Asteroid H277—Plus

On a Sun Line freighter navigating the cold void between worlds, petty officer Jon Akars calculates his path to fortune. He orchestrates a scheme of murder and theft aboard the Cinnabar, believing the vast emptiness of space will hide his crimes. But as he executes his betrayal, unforeseen consequences converge around a mysterious asteroid designated H277-Plus, an enigmatic celestial body whose nature threatens to unravel everything he has planned. The greed and betrayal that drive Akars toward his crime begin to answered in ways he never anticipated, as the stars themselves seem to weigh his guilt. Written during science fiction's pulp-era infancy, this compact space thriller delivers the genre at its most raw: interplanetary adventure shadowed by human darkness. Walton constructs a claustrophobic tale where the isolation of space becomes both instrument and witness to treachery, and where the mysterious cosmic element introduces an undertone of dread that predates modern science fiction's更大的宇宙恐怖.