Acheron's Wake

When the deep-space surveyor Acheron tears itself apart without warning, only two souls are left behind: Captain Soren Nyx, a by-the-book command prodigy who has built his entire identity on protocol and discipline, and Lieutenant Asa Kael, the reckless propulsion engineer whose demotion Nyx personally signed six years ago. Crammed into a single-berth escape pod with a fractured thermal regulator, a failing CO2 scrubber leaking poison into their shared air, and a hull crack weeping pressure seals, survival strips away every layer of rank and ritual. Nyx must hold Kael's freezing body to stave off hypothermia. Kael must repair systems Nyx cannot fix. Every argument over ration packets and oxygen reserves abrades the calcified scar of a classified incident that destroyed their academy friendship seventeen years ago. As the pod drifts into the ghost-field of a derelict generation ship with a dead emergency beacon, they are forced to confront not only the rivalry that tore their crew apart long before the Acheron failed, but the confession that their hatred was never the opposite of desire. In the dark of a dead ship, with rescue uncertain and air running thin, Nyx finally speaks the truth he has carried for six years, and Kael must decide whether the wound can ever close, or whether they will die as they lived: two enemies who were always something else to each other, and never had the words to say it.