Mayan Gene

Of eight billion people on Earth, why would something older than history reach across the dark for two farmers?
Some people are taken. Paul and Jim were chosen.
They work the Colorado high country - cousins, sharing the same land and the same life: cows to milk before dawn, hay to put up before the weather turns, a good year measured in rainfall and the price of feed. One morning they head up the mountain. Neither of them walks back down.
They wake somewhere that shouldn't exist: aboard ships older than human history, caught in a war between civilizations Earth was never meant to know. This was no random abduction. Dragged into a conflict between rival empires, the cousins uncover a truth buried in their blood - a ten-thousand-year-old secret that predates recorded human history.
They keep waiting to wake up on the mountain. It doesn't happen. The stars overhead aren't the ones they were born under, and something out there has watched that patch of sky for a very long time.
For readers who love first contact, ancient mysteries, and space opera - with the sense of wonder of Andy Weir and the scale of Craig Alanson.
Ten thousand years of silence just ended. Something has started to answer.
The stars remember what Earth forgot.

Mark Andrew Berezan is a Canadian author and the founder of Berezan Publishing, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He writes space opera for readers who want wonder, hope, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people thrust into impossible circumstances. His debut series, The Kino Chronicles, began as a manuscript in 1997 - a gift to his father - and spent nearly three decades evolving into the story it was always meant to be. Book One, Mayan Gene: The Stars Remember What Earth Forgot, follows two Colorado farmers who vanish from a mountain trail and wake in the middle of an interstellar war tied to a secret buried in their own bloodline for ten thousand years. Book Two, Achion: The Talisman Signal, is forthcoming in November 2026. berezanpublishing.com