Stranded Among the Stars

Fifty explorers. One crippled starship. No way home. The USS Venture was supposed to spend less than a day investigating an impossible gravitational anomaly. Instead, it vanishes from known space and emerges beside an unfamiliar red dwarf—with its navigation systems failing, its engines crippled, and a massive stellar eruption closing in. Their only refuge is a habitable planet below. The landing becomes a crash. Forty-six people survive. Ensign Milo Beckett isn't the captain, the chief engineer, or the smartest scientist aboard. He's a twenty-three-year-old systems integration officer whose job was to make sure everyone else had the power, equipment, personnel, and time they needed to do theirs. After the crash, that may be exactly the skill the survivors need most. Water must be secured. Power restored. Food produced. Lost equipment recovered. Alien biology understood. Industry rebuilt from whatever the planet can provide. And Venture's damaged AI, ARGUS, has activated an emergency recovery framework that begins measuring their progress in resources, infrastructure, capabilities, and increasingly strange objectives. Because this planet is not merely habitable. Its powerful magnetosphere seems almost perfectly suited to protecting life from its violent star. One of their recovery packages appears to have moved after landing. And ARGUS is beginning to produce information that was never stored in its databases. If the survivors want to reach orbit again, they won't repair their old civilization. They'll have to build a new one. A science-fiction survival and base-building LitRPG focused on exploration, engineering, logistics, technological progression, alien ecology, and rebuilding from a single crippled starship.