Arden Kayser

Dark Matter is a hard science fiction survival thriller for readers who want their space stories to feel earned - think The Martian's procedural problem-solving crossed with the disorienting wonder of Rendezvous with Rama. When a dark matter experiment goes wrong and leaves a Mars research station stranded somewhere it has no business being, the story becomes a locked-room puzzle on a cosmic scale - physicists, engineers, and crew working the problem with the tools they have, the knowledge they're rapidly building, and the creeping realization that their accident may be the most important discovery in human history.
Mars and Earth are out there somewhere, but this is almost entirely a shipboard story: tight, technical, and deeply human. (9.2K words)