The spaceliner Tellus is dying. A catastrophic failure has ripped her apart in the void between stars, and hundreds of lives are bleeding into the cold. The ISP cruiser Scorpio is the only ship close enough to answer the distress call. But the rescue will cost everything. To reach the Tellus before she breaks apart completely, Commander Kerry must push his vessel past every safety limit, gambling with his crew's lives in a race against physics itself. As the hulls drift closer and the window of survival narrows, each decision becomes impossible: who do you save first? How much are you willing to lose? This is not a tale of clean victories or certain triumph. This is space opera stripped to its bones, where heroism means choosing who lives and who dies, where the void doesn't care about courage, and where the bravest thing you can do is keep reaching forward when every instinct screams retreat. Stanley Mullen writes with the visceral intensity of someone who understands that the stars are not kind.
