Cold Burn

Two astronauts from the same doomed flagship — once lovers, now enemies — are forced into a single damaged escape pod with a dwindling oxygen supply and no communications array. Kael Mercer lost his entire squad to an order Ethan Cross gave during a classified mission failure ten years ago, and the silence between them has calcified into a bitter, intimate hatred that reads like perverse devotion. As they drift through a debris field too dense for rescue, sharing body heat to stave off hypothermia, every rationed breath drags them back to the touch-starved nights before the betrayal. But the pod was never meant to save them — its systems are failing on a programmed decay, and embedded in its black box are the original, unfalsified telemetry logs that reveal the truth: neither man was responsible for the deaths. Command fabricated the evidence that turned them against each other. To survive, they must repair the oxygen scrubber using one another's biosignatures, carve the truth from a decade of shared trauma, and decide if the only person worth surviving for is the enemy they were made to destroy.