Carrier Wave

Eva Reyes wakes upside down in the wreckage of her lander, an alarm still ringing in her skull, on a moon no human being has ever set foot on. The ship that brought her to Tiamat will never fly again. The air she breathes will not last two weeks. And the only voices in her world are the crackling, static-torn transmissions of the crew orbiting far overhead — close enough to talk to in real time, too far to reach her in time to matter. Four hundred million kilometers away, Earth listens forty minutes late to everything she says, like news from the dead. Between her and rescue stands nothing but a cracked engine bell, a countdown measured in days of oxygen, and the crew of the orbiter Meridian, racing to fold an impossible trajectory out of fuel, time, and hope. Carrier Wave is a tense, intimate survival thriller about the distances that separate us — between planets, between a dying signal and the ears straining to catch it, between one competent, frightened woman and the people trying desperately to bring her home. Told in the hush of a failing spacecraft and the crackle of a lifeline that might not hold, it is a story about what we carry with us when everything else is stripped away, and what it costs to keep a voice steady when the silence gets large.