Seventeen Hours

Kaelen Voss and Darian Cross, rival pilots from warring interstellar corporations, awaken sealed inside a failing escape pod with seventeen hours of oxygen and no prospect of rescue. A deliberate trajectory hack originating from their own company has marooned them together, forcing them to share a single life-support tether in a cramped, dark coffin drifting past uncharted debris fields. Their enmity is legend: five years of sabotage, accusations, and one deep-orbit collision that killed Kaelen's previous navigator under Darian's cloud of suspicion. As oxygen bleeds out through microfractures, the pod's diagnostics reveal that someone inside their company wanted them both eliminated. The classified logs they carry—evidence of illegal weapons testing authorized by their mentor, Director Aldric Vance—make them liabilities to be silenced. In the tight space between rationed breaths and whispered confessions, hostility unspools into agonizing tenderness. To survive, they must dismantle the masks they have worn for five years and face the truth: the real enemy is not in the void outside, but in the command they once trusted. The novel ends with their rescue and the discovery that Vance's conspiracy extends far beyond one man, leaving them in protective custody with a new kind of battle ahead.