CHAPTER 2: DESCENT

Elias had made his choice.

Through the viewport, the Odyssey-4 loomed ahead, its dark hull catching the faint glow of the system’s distant star. The numbers were final. The trajectory was locked. There was no undoing this.

Inside, behind reinforced glass, he saw them. Small figures. Shadows against the light. Someone was at the window, staring up at him. Others gathered behind them, unmoving. Watching.

Elias swallowed hard. Ten seconds.

Nine.

His fingers dug into the armrests.

Eight.

His body was frozen, but his mind was screaming—This is it.

Seven.

Then—something shifted. A flicker on the nav screen. A tiny drift.

Six.

His stomach flipped. The numbers—his perfect, brutal numbers—were off.

Five.

His gut told him before the instruments confirmed it. The Icarus wasn’t holding course. It was veering.

Four.

The viewport window, the figures, the Odyssey-4—they were sliding away.

Three.

His eyes snapped to the telemetry, his brain shifting into high gear.

Two.

Thrust asymmetry. The burn had been off.

One.

He wasn’t going to hit the Odyssey-4.

He was going to miss.

Elias sucked in a breath, heart pounding as he scanned the data. The burn had fired unevenly—just enough for the ship to yaw slightly, throwing him off course. He should have expected it. The asteroid strike had already compromised the hull, and his stabilizers had been barely holding together. When he fired the last thrust, the force hadn’t distributed evenly.

The result? He was still accelerating. Still doomed. But now his target had changed.

The planet.

His fingers flew over the console. The Icarus had veered, but its vector was still locked—only now, instead of slamming into the Odyssey-4, he was falling toward the massive world below.

Not a slow descent. Not an orbit.

A full-speed atmospheric entry.

Elias swore under his breath.

This planet wasn’t ready for human settlement. It was barely past preliminary terraforming surveys. The Ark-12 colonists were supposed to arrive decades from now, after the surface had been made habitable. The only reason anyone was even orbiting it—the scientists, the military, the settlers in cryosleep—was to study it, not land on it.

And yet, here he was. Falling.

His hands clenched. This wasn’t survival. This was impact.

The hull creaked as the first thin wisps of atmosphere licked against the failing frame of the Icarus.

Elias gritted his teeth. He wasn’t dead yet.