Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s 2021 novel Leviathan Falls marked the end of an era for authors, who write together under the pseudonym James S.A. Corey. They spent a decade together on their first series, The Expanse, a sprawling science-fiction story stretched over nine novels, a series of novellas and short stories, and a well-received six-season TV adaptation that started on Syfy and migrated to Amazon Video. Apart from a 2014 media tie-in novel, Star Wars: Honor Among Thieves, they’d devoted their entire writing careers to one universe. Starting over in a new setting, with a completely new story, must have been at least a little intimidating.
But there’s no hint of caution or reserve in the Captive’s War books, which began with 2024’s instant New York Times bestseller The Mercy of Gods and continues with this month’s The Faith of Beasts. (No surprise: the series is being developed for an Amazon adaptation.) Abraham and Franck launch directly into a bold alien-invasion scenario, one where humanity has no chance of winning the initial conflict. The Carryx, a powerful alien race that harvests and enslaves “useful” species and destroys all others, claims the human world of Anjiin, killing an eighth of its population in the blink of an eye, as a casual dominance display.
The protagonists, a group of scientists and researchers on the brink of an important discovery, are brought to a cathedral-like Carryx “world-palace” packed with other alien species, and ordered to continue their research, on the Carryx’s behalf.As science-lab workers Dafyd Alkhor, Tonner Freis, Jessyn Kaul, and others learn, they’re expected to demonstrate humanity’s worth to the Carryx, or the aliens will exterminate their entire species. (The title The Mercy of Gods can be taken as deeply ironic — or just a pointed reminder of how little empathy anyone can expect from the supremely powerful.)
The first book in the series covers the conquest of Anjiin, the fallout as the protagonists respond in different ways, and the reveal that one of the kidnapped lab workers is no longer human. Ultimately, it centers on Dafyd’s attempts to understand Carryx society and philosophy, and negotiate a way for humanity to survive. Now Abraham and Franck take their next big leap in The Faith of Beasts, published April 14. You can read the first chapter below.
Anjiin had been home to four and a half billion people. The Carryx had taken a little under four thousand of them back to serve in the world-palace.
One in seven died in the crossing or from illnesses and accidents after arrival. Once humanity had proven its worth in the eyes of the empire, the groups — and sometimes even isolated individuals — scattered in the first days of their captivity were brought back together like a lost family finding itself in the wilderness, except for the almost five hundred people who were set apart and sent away on tasks that the Carryx alone understood.
The new space they now inhabited was like a vast single building dedicated to the human hive, simultaneously more authentic and deeply changed. The gaps in Carryx understanding of humans had narrowed. Bathrooms now had dispensers for the red cleansing gel instead of every shower beginning with it. The mysteries of hair cutting and shaving, trimming nails and dealing with menstruation were accommodated. The unspoken indignities of human life were a degree more dignified.
In exchange, the proportions of the passageways had become wider, the walls canted slightly in, the air had taken on a pungent smell like resin and salt. The odd scent was everywhere, permeated everything, and so became unremarkable. People only noticed it when they returned from travel out in the common areas of the world-palace or after spending time in the little garden at the top of the habitat where the breeze was cool and thin, like the air on a mountaintop. And the view was breathtaking.
To the east, two huge arcs rose up from the planet’s surface below, curving up beyond the atmosphere. Lights dotted their sides — decorative, purposeful, or just the gleam of a million windows. Below them, the dark forms of other ziggurats rose out of the clouds and stretched off to the distant horizon.
The garden itself was smaller than the quad outside Dafyd’s apartment on Anjiin had been. A single tree with deep purple-brown bark and thick, leathery leaves, a bed of wild mint, and a fountain of black metal and pale stone that rose to Dafyd’s waist if he was standing, its flowing water a constant mutter. It astounded him that something so modest could feel like luxury.
The little Sinen, looking like the cross of goat and cuttlefish, finished its announcement and left him pressing his thumbs against his eyelids. His headache didn’t diminish. He heard Jellit’s footsteps coming up the stairway and didn’t look up.
“Something wrong?” the other man asked.
“Another summons from my lord and master,” Dafyd said. “Ekur wants to talk about something.”
“More alterations in our duties and responsibilities?”
“I’ll know when I get there,” Dafyd said, and hauled himself up. “Anything I should know from the visualization lab?”
“Nothing that’s not in the report,” Jellit said. He seemed on the edge of saying more, but didn’t, and Dafyd went down the wide stairway into the body of the moiety without him. The Sinen clerk followed.
Campar was gone on some mysterious mission for the Carryx. So was Rickar. And Jessyn. But so far as Dafyd knew they were still alive, wherever they’d been sent. Nöl, Synnia, Else, and Irinna were all dead. Of the group Dafyd had known on Anjiin, the only ones around him now were Tonner, who hated him, and Jellit, who had gone from an almost-enemy to Dafyd’s accomplice in exposing the human rebellion against the Carryx. They were now joined by the blood on their hands.
To everyone who hadn’t known him before, Dafyd was the voice of the Carryx. The man to speak to when something was needed, and the conduit for demands from the empire. The high priest interceding between his people and their godlike masters.
He stopped at his room. Papers and notes were in piles all through the place with the lists of every name in the human population, who they had been before the Carryx invasion, and what they were doing now. What they wanted. What they needed. He took half a dozen pages with the notes he’d prepared.
The report he needed most was still missing. Of course it was.
“I have to stop by the labs,” Dafyd said to the Sinen overseer. “Tonner was supposed to give me an update. It’s not here.”
The little box he wore at his chest made a series of wet coughs, and the Sinen replied with a small trill and sigh. The voice that came from the box at its chest was impassive. “If you do, you do.”
It wasn’t permission, and so it was half a threat. The tension at his temples felt like he was wearing an invisible crown as he went back out to the common corridor and headed down.
The promotion of the human moiety had carried in a wave of equipment and material even as it left any of the familiar human designs behind. The tanks and refrigerators, incubators and protein assays, spectrometers and pseudo-lens microscopy in the new labs were the best designs of the Carryx empire, the genius and insights of a thousand other species. The machines reminded Dafyd of the contents of some exotic tide pool, taken out and laid in order by a curious child. Some of the objects were grotesque, some were beautiful, and a few defied comprehension.
Tonner’s new second was a tall, thin man named Brun with dark hair and an almost comically prominent larynx. In a previous life, he’d been the leader of one of the most successful chemical manufacturing cooperatives on Anjiin. Now he was standing with half a dozen of Tonner’s new team, considering what looked like the segmented back of a crayfish the size of a table. Brun’s eyes lit up when he saw Dafyd.
“It’s a static centrifuge,” the tall man said with a grin. “Can you beat that?”
Where’s Tonner? was in the front of Dafyd’s mind, but A static what? came out of his mouth.
“I know,” Brun said. “You tell the little half-mind thing what acceleration you want and for how long, and it generates the g-force without spinning. I don’t know how it even does that, but this thing can do specific gravity control like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s a kicker.”
“Where’s Tonner?”
“The legacy labs,” Brun said. “He said he’d be back after midday, but you know how he gets.”
Dafyd turned toward the common areas, the Sinen at his heels. He walked a little faster.
When they’d first come, the cathedral had been a circle of wonders and terrors — a crossroads of alien bodies with the power to overwhelm. The deep tectonic strangeness had been enough to feel like annihilation. Now Dafyd walked around weird almost-crabs the size of dogs without thinking. The luminescent blue gnats so small they seemed like a living light meant that he shouldn’t breathe in as he passed through them to keep from sucking one into his throat. The Phylarchs of Astrdeim with their glowing eyes and flickering joints lumbered by, as familiar as buses and bicycles had once been. The Eddentic of Lof swirled in the high air, the Oumenti and Soun clicked to one another in the low. Each of them had a place in the Carryx world, some function they fulfilled for their masters. The fact that Dafyd had no idea what barely registered with him anymore. His mind building walls between things he needed to know and things he could safely ignore.
He threaded his way across the wide public square of their shared moieties and cut across to the wall with the lab annex they had taken from the Night Drinkers, the little hallway with its high slate bench and recognizable equipment. The glass cubes that had housed the berries and the not-turtles were empty. That project was over, and the next ones had begun.
The time since Anjiin had diminished Tonner Freis. It was more than physical. Before their subjugation, Tonner had been — at least in the moment — the most celebrated researcher on the planet. His prematurely gray hair had been a contrast with his youth and vigor then. Now there was a harshness to his face. It wasn’t age, but it mimicked it. He leaned against the old protein assay. The fingers of his nearly-healed broken arm poked out of their splint and rubbed together like they were trying to find something. When he saw Dafyd, he shook his head.
“The new lab machines are a mistake,” Tonner said instead of hello. “We need to get to work. Work. Not spend half a year figuring out the controls on a bunch of new equipment. Institutional knowledge is a valuable thing. You can’t just throw it all out because the cockroach kings decided to give you some pretty toys.”
The translator on the Sinen’s chest burbled Tonner’s words at it. Dafyd flinched, then patted the air in warning. This thing is listening. Calm down. “That wasn’t my decision.”
“I thought it was all your decision,” Tonner spat back at him. “Aren’t you the boss around here?”
“You know I’m not,” Dafyd said.
Tonner glanced over to the Sinen loitering in the space behind them and smirked. “Whatever you say.”
“I’ve been called in to the librarian. I need your report.”
“I don’t have it,” Tonner said, and then, seeing Dafyd’s expression, “My team is gone. I am training up a new one, and it’s not like you’ve given me a bunch of impressionable new research assistants. Brun ran his own union, Addira has two decades of her own research, Abfoss was due for retirement in a few years. Everyone thinks they know a better way to do everything. None of them will just do as they’re fucking told. I had a group. I had people.” Tonner’s voice cracked on the last word, and he took a few seconds to gather himself. “So yes. Please let the cockroach kings know that I am doing what I can to get up to speed, and sometimes writing down a note saying so is less important to me than doing the actual job.”
“Can you just tell me about where things stand? Just verbally.”
Tonner shrugged and the protein assay chimed the way that meant it was shifting to a polymerization phase. Tonner looked out past his shoulder. He looked exhausted.
“Making our own food supply is going to take about twice the hydroponic capacity we have right now. That’s tanks, lights, filtration, micronutrients, everything. It looks like we will be able to adapt the silicate microfarm from the berries to general use, so low-volume production’s mostly covered. Training more people to do the analysis for protein translation — which should be the most useful thing we do for them — is going to take me months.”
His shrug meant What the hell do you want from me?
“So. Double the hydroponics,” Dafyd said.
“Sure. Start there,” Tonner said. He almost turned away, then paused. “Have you heard from any of them?”
Them. Jessyn, Rickar, Campar. The only ones left.
“No,” Dafyd said. “Not yet.”
Ekur-Tkalal shifted its abdomen on four thin legs while Dafyd finished his report. Its thorax and head stayed steady, the two massive black-and-red fighting arms planted against the floor. Which was good. As long as those arms stayed on the floor, it wasn’t ready to kill him. Its four eyes moved independently as if each was distracted by a separate thought, and the mantis-like feeding arms in its chest unfolded and manipulated small shapes of floating light whose projectors Dafyd couldn’t identify. Every now and then, the Carryx chirped or burbled to itself, but the half-mind at its throat didn’t say anything. If there were words in its vocalizations, they weren’t meant for him. The Sinen who’d brought the summons stayed in the room with them, which was new. And, Dafyd thought, a little ominous.
While the Carryx finished whatever work occupied it, Dafyd waited. The room Dafyd thought of as the keeper-librarian’s office was small, and the sounds of other Carryx singing to each other carried from the passageways behind him. Ekur shifted the objects of light for another few moments, then began to speak.
Its living voice was like birdsong, only deep, slow, and threatening. The voice that came from its half-mind was human and featureless. If it seemed to have a dismissive quality to it, that might only have been Dafyd’s prejudices.
“Your efforts in making one animal species nourishing to other species are of interest to the empire. Your work with imaging and gravimetric lensing is also of interest. You will put your efforts into these two things. No other human activities are of interest. Your other efforts are wasteful and will end. Reorganize your moiety around those things which are useful.”
“I understand,” Dafyd said. “We will.”
“Also, I have no use for animal scratchings. You will submit your reports in proper archival form.”
Dafyd lowered himself to his knees and spread his arms wider, palms against the floor. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“This one will instruct you,” Ekur-Tkalal said, gesturing at the Sinen with one of its feeding hands. “Your moiety has been found of interest by the Sovran. You will prepare for greater use in the empire. Anticipate assignment on thousands of worlds.”
“Ah. There are only about three thousand of us here,” Dafyd said.
The Carryx shifted its weight. Three of its eyes came to rest on Dafyd. “Yes. Your population is insufficient to meet future need.”
“Will you bring more from Anjiin? Are there other people coming — ”
“You are to breed locally for the empire’s use. A moiety that cannot sustain its own population is not useful and will be culled.”
The air had gone thin. Dafyd tried to catch his breath. “I don’t know… I mean…”
“If you have requirements to support a generation of young, express them. If they are not overly arduous, they will be provided.”
“Our children… Our young take a long time growing up,” Dafyd said. “They grow slowly. They have to be educated.”
“I am aware,” Ekur-Tkalal said. “The will of the Sovran compasses eons. Begin now. Have them ready when we have use for them.”
And if they don’t want to? he thought. But he knew the answer. It was the same as always: Find a way or get them all killed.
“I understand,” he said. And the hell of it was, he did.
The Faith of Beasts is available now from Amazon, the Orbit Books website, Bookshop.org, and similar online or physical book retailers.
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