Atlas Adrift
by Jay Hyx
A traumatized captain hides in his cabin while his crew runs the ship without him — until a territorial standoff forces the lie into the open.
Synopsis
Holland Jordan was a brilliant captain. Then his business partner betrayed him, cost him everything, and left him hollowed out. Now he drinks in his cabin while Felicia, his operations manager, makes every real decision — staffing, budgets, mission calls. The crew knows. Nobody says it.
When a mining claim in disputed frontier space puts them nose-to-nose with a rival crew that reads weakness like a predator reads blood, the fiction of Holland's command collapses. Felicia can't shield him forever. The crew can't compensate indefinitely. ATLAS, the ship's AGI, has already calculated they have six to eight months before the whole structure fails.
Atlas Adrift is frontier industrial sci-fi about broken leadership, found family, and what happens when a crew decides the captain's authority is conditional on his actual participation. The physics will kill you, the corporations own your debt, and the only way out is through the truth nobody wants to speak.
