A synopsis, told without the ending

The year is 2251. Deep beneath Crater Clavius on the Moon, a secret international agency called MMDI operates the only working time travel facility in human history. Its agents are young men recruited from Earth, housed in a labyrinth of corridors cut into lunar rock, and sent backward through time to carry out missions their commanders define and withhold in equal measure.

The agency exists because the capability of human time travel was given to humanity be highly intelligent extraterrestrial aliens from a distant galaxy. The first country to develop the human use of time machines is China. In the 22nd century, Chinese scientists achieved the first successful human travel in time to the past, but killed people living above ground where the secret facility was situated. Rather than suppress the discovery, the Chinese government help to create an international body with a controlled program. MMDI was the result: a multinational directorate with one mandate, a budget that does not appear on any public ledger, and there is a black site base that no government officially acknowledges.

Vincent Wauneka is one of MMDI’s most accomplished operatives. A Navajo from Arizona, fluent in eight languages and trained in the psychological arts of recruitment and manipulation, this man has completed more missions to the twentieth century than almost any other agent on the roster. His current assignment has sent him back to 1991 Arizona over seventy times, scouting candidates along desert highways and reservation roads, looking for the one man the Directorate has decided it needs.

Above him in the chain of command sits General Chaz Yang, MMDI’s director and the most feared figure on the lunar base. Yang is fifty-five, Chinese-born, raised in Beijing, and possessed of a temper calibrated to keep every man in his orbit slightly off-balance. He rewards compliance with a phrase — “kiss, kiss” — that carries more menace than affection. He controls the mission logs, the return schedules, and the careers of every agent who steps into one of the blue glass chambers and disappears.

The blue glass chambers are the heart of the facility: massive circular devices the agents have come to call Giant Blue Hockey Pucks. A man enters naked, and the device fills with a thick, foul-smelling white propellant that spins him through time. He materializes in the past fully clothed, costumed by machinery that replicates whatever era he has been sent to. He returns the same way — naked, disoriented, drenched in the propellant, standing in front of uniformed men who demand the code word of the day before they will let him back into the base.

What the agents are not told, and what the novel moves toward revealing, is the true reason MMDI was founded. Beneath the base, deeper than any inhabited level, something was discovered in 2192 that rewrote every assumption human civilization had made about its own uniqueness in the universe. The Directorate has kept that discovery secret ever since. The time travel program is not the point. It is the cover.

Clavius Deep is the story of a young Navajo operative who is very good at his job and slowly becoming aware that the job is not what it appears. It is the story of a general who commands absolute loyalty from men he treats as interchangeable. And it is the first novel in The Clavius Harvest series from author Madeira Desouza — a wild ride that shows what humanity is prepared to do when our species discovers we have never been alone.