The Gone World

In a possible future version of 2199, a young trainee named Shannon Moss explores a dead, frozen landscape in what was once West Virginia, beneath two suns: the familiar sun and a white radiance called the White Hole. Her instructor has warned her about quantum-tunneling nanoparticles (QTNs), extradimensional entities that infiltrate human cells and eventually override consciousness. In a clearing by a black river, Moss sees a woman crucified upside down in midair and recognizes the woman as herself. A rescue crew pulls the crucified woman aboard their ship, but Moss wakes insisting they saved the wrong body. Her instructor explains the Terminus: the extinction event ending humanity in every future the Naval Space Command (NSC) has observed, driven by QTNs arriving through the White Hole. The Terminus has been moving steadily closer to the present.

In 1997, Moss is a 27-year-old agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), biologically close to 40 from time-travel missions to possible futures called inadmissible future trajectories (IFTs). She lost her left leg during her crucifixion. FBI Special Agent Philip Nestor calls her to a triple homicide in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania: A Navy SEAL named Patrick Mursult is the primary suspect in the ax murders of his wife and two younger children. Their fingernails and toenails have been removed, and his 17-year-old daughter, Marian, is missing. The crime scene is at the house where Moss's childhood best friend, Courtney Gimm, once lived; Courtney was murdered at 16, driving Moss toward criminal justice and NCIS. FBI Special Agent in Charge William Brock briefs Moss: Mursult has been listed missing in action since 1983, a sailor aboard the USS Libra, a ship lost during classified deep-space and deep-time missions.

Moss and Nestor track Elric Fleece, Mursult's war buddy and fellow Libra crew member, to a remote house in West Virginia. They find Nazi flags, deer-bone sculptures hung upside down resembling the crucified figures of the Terminus, and Fleece's body hanging from a tree of bones. In a spare bedroom, they find intimate Polaroids of an unidentified woman and a pager. Following the pager's records, Moss locates Mursult's body at the Blackwater Falls Lodge, shot execution-style. He did not kill his family; someone hunted him down. Moss's supervisor, O'Connor, instructs her to travel to an IFT.

Moss arrives in September 2015. NCIS physicist Dr. Wally Njoku briefs her: Marian's remains were found in 2004; the woman in the Polaroids is Nicole Onyongo, a registered nurse involved with Mursult; and the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) facility was destroyed in April 1998 by a suicide bomber, killing over 1,000 people. The Terminus has advanced to 2067.

Under an alias, Moss befriends Nicole and reconnects with Nestor, who has left the FBI. Nicole confesses that her late husband Jared Bietak's friends, Charles Cobb and Karl Hyldekrugger, killed Mursult. All three were Libra sailors. Nicole reveals the ship's history: Under Commander Elizabeth Remarque, the crew reached the galaxies NGC 5194 and NGC 5055, where they discovered Esperance, a planet teeming with alien life. On its surface, alien spores dismantled crew members, driving others to madness. The Terminus followed Libra through every jump. Remarque proposed destroying the ship, but Hyldekrugger led a mutiny, killing Remarque and her loyalists.

FBI undercover agent Vivian Lincoln warns Moss that Hyldekrugger's network plans to kill her. Moss kills Cobb during her escape but is intercepted by an elderly Brock, whose wife and daughters died in the CJIS attack. Desperate to reach Moss's home timeline, called terra firma, where his family still lives, Brock has killed two FBI agents to get to her. Moss explains that his family survives in 1997, but his existence will vanish when she leaves the IFT. Brock shoots himself.

Back in 1997, Moss gives Brock the suspects' names. His team traces activity in the Blackwater Gorge to a house in Buckhannon, West Virginia, where Moss finds a chemical-weapons lab, a truck filled with bodies killed by poison gas, and Marian among the dead. Bietak is killed in the firefight. Then Brock calls: A living Marian has been found in the woods, hypothermic but alive. She is an "echo," a duplicate from another timeline brought through the Vardogger, a thin space in the forest where timelines overlap, created by Libra's engine. One Marian is dead; another is alive.

Moss and Brock visit Ryan Wrigley Torgersen, the CJIS bomber. His wife describes how men took him through the Vardogger and showed him her death, then returned her alive in exchange for obedience. Torgersen detonates a bomb concealed in his body, killing himself and Brock.

Moss launches to a second IFT, where Nestor, still with the FBI, briefs her on domestic-terrorism attacks linked to Buckhannon, each carried out by echoes Hyldekrugger placed as insiders. Ballistics connect these attacks through copies of the same gun. Among the matches is the unsolved murder of Carla Durr, a lawyer who had been meeting with Dr. Peter Driscoll, a scientist developing nanotech from classified NSC research.

Nestor drives Moss and Vivian to the Vardogger, then betrays them. Having seen the Terminus, he believes Hyldekrugger is right to prevent NSC from rediscovering Esperance. He shoots Vivian and delivers Moss to Hyldekrugger and Cobb. They beat her and drag her across the river into the Terminus winter, to the wreck of Libra. The ship's Brandt-Lomonaco (B-L) quantum-foam engine has trapped it in a Gödel curve, a closed timelike loop that resets with each misfire. Hyldekrugger imprisons Moss in the brig. Nicole, who has aged years since meeting Moss during the mutiny, frees her and helps her escape.

Moss returns to 1997 and realizes she is herself an echo, pulled from the cross during her first excursion. She tries to save Durr, but the Navy arrests Durr first and obtains Mursult's information about Esperance. The White Hole appears when a Navy shuttle called the Onyx fires its B-L drive, and the Terminus follows the ship's path back to Earth. Everyone aboard is dead from QTN-induced madness, and footage on the ship reveals Esperance. By saving Durr, Moss enables the chain of information that ends the world.

Refusing evacuation, Moss drives through the apocalyptic landscape to the Vardogger. She strips the dry space suit from the frozen body of the "real" Shannon Moss near the tree line and follows the burning path to Libra. Inside, she enters the Gödel loop during the mutiny. Nicole leads her to Remarque in the wardroom. Mursult blocks their path, but Moss tells him his daughter's name and describes his family's future; he lowers his weapon. Remarque begins the cascade-failure sequence to destroy the B-L drive. Hyldekrugger's forces breach the engine room, killing Nicole and Remarque. Moss is shot. But the cascade has begun: A black hole opens in the engine and expands, swallowing Libra, the Terminus, and everything the ship created. Moss slips into the darkness, "no longer a body but a wave of light" (381).

The epilogue takes place on January 28, 1986, after the cascade failure has erased Libra and reset reality to before the ship's voyage. A 15-year-old Shannon Moss walks through snowy Canonsburg with Courtney Gimm, who is alive, bearing only a white scar from a survived attack. Shannon has just learned she is pregnant. She lies on Courtney's bedroom floor imagining a future with Courtney's brother, Davy Gimm. Looking out the window, she sees a perfect circle of footsteps in the snow with no tracks leading to or from it, as if someone appeared, walked in a circle, and vanished. She imagines Davy at sea, praying to a star he has named for her, and trusts that no matter how far he sails, he will one day sail for home.