Cold Soak

Five hours to the only launch window home. Jack Richardson has five hours and forty minutes of oxygen, and a choice to make with every one of them.

Artemis Base is gone. A catastrophe at the lunar south pole has killed all six crew inside and left Jack alone on the surface, kilometres of dead ground between him and the ascent vehicle, with nothing to breathe but his suit. Above him the sun only circles the horizon, low and cold, and never sets.

"Your only mission now is to come home," Mission Control tells him. "Nothing else is yours to carry."

Jack cuts the channel and goes the other way.

His crew are still in that wreck, and he knows to the breath what the air in his tanks is worth. He knows, too, what it costs a man to obey an order like this, because he has obeyed one before. This time he is going back, and what he carries out of the dark will decide whether he comes home at all.

Cold Soak is a hard science-fiction novella about the arithmetic of survival and the things we refuse to leave behind. Grounded, cinematic, and stark, for readers who want the loneliness of space made real.