Two pilots. One ship. Seven days in deep space testing the most significant propulsion breakthrough in forty years.That was the mission.On day three, a contamination alert seals them on opposite sides of an airlock — one man in a chamber the size of a closet, one man in a corridor with nowhere to go — and the ship's AI named Ness delivers the kind of news nobody wants to hear. One of them may be infected. The system will decide in ten minutes. The system does not negotiate.They are not friends. They have never been friends. What sits between them goes back further than this mission and runs deeper than professional rivalry, and now there is nothing between them but thirty centimetres of porthole glass and a clock that is not stopping for either of them.Every accusation lands somewhere neither of them planned. Every defense strips something back that was never meant to be seen. And underneath all of it a question keeps surfacing that neither of them has been willing to ask out loud — why were they really chosen for this mission, and who exactly knew what before the ship ever left the dock?Ness is listening. Ness is measuring. And Ness is beginning to find things buried inside her own systems that her designers never told her were there.Ten minutes to find out who lives and who dies, on a ship two million kilometres from anyone who could help, carrying an engine that changed everything — and a secret that was never meant to reach home.The clock is running.#audio #audiobook #audiobooks