Shroud

Deep in the Prospector413 system, the survey vessel Garveneer reaches a lightless moon wrapped in dense, poisonous atmosphere — a world that should be dead, yet answers back with pulses of sound and electromagnetic signal. When an accident sends two crew members crashing to the surface in a fragile pod, they must survive a pitch-black, crushing, hostile biosphere while confronting the intelligence that lives there: something utterly unlike them, with which — impossibly — they must find a way to communicate. Set in a future ruled by extraction-hungry corporate "Concerns," Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud is a claustrophobic first-contact survival story about two minds reaching across an almost unbridgeable divide.