Perihelion

Wesley Cole has four years of life left. He's known this since he was born three years ago.

He's a corporate infiltration asset, manufactured and trained to pass as a twenty-three-year-old graduate from Michigan, embedded at a research colony to gather intelligence on an experimental warship before its launch. His cover is solid. His handlers are patient. His extraction window is years away.

Then someone attacks the colony first.

In the chaos, Wesley finds himself dragging two people he was never supposed to care about; a mouthy quartermaster who's been blackmailing him, and the mechanic who just finished arming an experimental mecha meant for someone else. The Daedalus, a prototype starship, launches with a fraction of its intended crew: sixty people, three dogs, and a handful of children who were doing show-and-tell when the bombs started falling. Behind them, an enemy commander who won't stop chasing. Ahead of them, four months of dark, silent transit to Earth, with no backup and a frigate that was meant as a test bed not a warship.

Wesley's mission was simple: observe, report, survive. But survival starts costing him the most precious resource he has left; time.

Perihelion is a hard science fiction story about an undermanned warship's voyage home; about the mathematics of resource scarcity, the impossible decisions of command, and a found family built from whoever happened to be in the hangar when everything went wrong. It's about a young man who was built to disappear in seven years, and what he chooses to do with the time he has left.