Life Support

After seven years of mutual hatred following a cockpit fire that killed their crew, flight surgeon Major Callen Dray and pilot Commander Vero Kincaid are the sole survivors of a carrier explosion, stranded together in an escape pod with failing life support calibrated for one. The pod's medical AI refuses to take orders from a pilot, so Callen must initiate a neural sync protocol requiring skin-to-skin conductivity patches that plunge him directly into Vero's fragmented memories of the accident he has spent seven years burying. As oxygen dwindles, hull frost spreads across the viewport, and the CO₂ scrubbers degrade hour by hour, the sync pulls them deeper through the fight they never finished, through suppressed longing neither acknowledged, through a truth about the cockpit fire that looks nothing like Callen's version of events. Callen discovers that Vero's mind is not merely surviving but holding onto him with a devotion that borders on obsession, a feeling Callen has no framework to receive. With the rescue beacon still nineteen days from reaching anyone and life-support systems failing one by one, Callen faces an impossible choice: sever the neural link to conserve his own remaining oxygen, or stay connected to a man whose entire consciousness is reaching for him. The pod drifts into the debris field, and something outside — something that is not rescue — begins to move.