SILENT DESCENT
AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE, NOVEMBER 5TH, 2026
Jack Davis and the SPIRE team are back for the continuation of the Classified Skies series.
In the summer of 1999, a swamp in southern Arkansas goes silent. Jack Davis, a meteorologist who used to have a normal job, is sitting in an aluminum boat with a thermal camera when something eight feet tall steps out of the cypress. It does not run. It does not hide. Its heat signature simply drains out of the world while Jack watches, and the only trace left behind is a narrow radio signal at 1.6 gigahertz that no instrument on Earth should have recorded.
Thousands of miles to the south, the U.S. Navy is dragging a sonar array across the floor of a Chilean fjord, looking for three intact discs that have been resting in the dark for eighteen months. They find them, lift them under cover of fog, file a false destination, and vanish into the Pacific. SPIRE spends three months watching the wrong coastline before Jack finally learns the truth from a road train driver in an outback pub: the discs crossed an ocean and went into a hole in the Australian desert that nobody is permitted to see.
But someone else has been listening for that frequency far longer than SPIRE has. Bob Sinclair's chief scientist has been held without charge for two years by people who do not officially exist. A Sinaloa cartel boss with fifty dead men to answer for has sent a quiet, careful engineer to Little Rock to study the columns holding up SPIRE's headquarters. A federal prosecutor is closing in on what SPIRE brought home from Mexico. And when Jess Bowden crosses a boundary line in the Woomera Prohibited Area at midnight and photographs something fifteen meters across being lowered into the ground, the men who take her already know her name.
What follows is a firestorm in downtown Little Rock, a bargain struck in a hospital room with a man who can make a federal investigation disappear, and a rescue attempted in firefighter's yellow on a burning New Mexico mesa. Because there are two American factions hunting the same impossible thing, they are not speaking to each other, and the discovery that finally breaks the case open is not a machine at all. It is a folktale, told by an old woman in a forest on the far side of the world, about lights that answer when you sing to them and do not always come as lights.