the requisitioner

a novel by

Mario Reinaldo Machado

After Constantine, a Requisitioner for the Western Empire, crash lands on the surface of an alien planet in search of raw materials to support the war effort back on Earth, she’s taken captive by the Urrt, a strange, non-gendered and radically-egalitarian species of sentient fungi. As her baptism into this alien world unfolds, Constantine finds herself plagued by the ghostly memories of life and loss and the echoes of past non-human entanglements, all of which seem somehow wrapped up in the mysteries of this planet and the whispered prophecies of the Urrt. 

As she soldiers on, pursuing her mission, learning the language and assimilating into the fungal tribe, she finds her allegiances torn: between this world and her own, between the Urrt and the Empire, and between the warring factions and religious sects of the Urrt themselves. Ultimately, Constantine must resolve these contradictions not just for her own sake, nor solely for the sake of Earth, but for the sake of her daughter—half-human and half-machine—a captive of the very empire she is bound by oath to serve.