Open Invitation

A scout from beyond the stars has landed on Earth, and he has exactly one mission: keep his people's coordinates hidden. Humanity just cracked interstellar travel, and now the galaxy is a little smaller and a lot more dangerous. Zoya Lar-Tul knows too much. The Earth scientists are curious, brilliant, and utterly unaware that showing their new spacecraft to an alien visitor could spark an invasion they cannot hope to survive. Every question they ask, every piece of technology they display, narrows his options. He must balance the hospitality he has been shown against the survival of his species, and the only way out requires a lie that could cost him everything. This is first contact at its most treacherous: not with phasers blazing, but with two civilizations circling each other, each holding the other's future in their hands.