Tartarus 9

The Tartarus-9 is a fourteen-thousand-ton nuclear crawler, grinding through the abyssal mud of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Frank Galloway and Jo Mercer are its pilots... seasoned, isolated, and bound by a five-year professional partnership that has never crossed the line. When a catastrophic landslide crushes the starboard auxiliary pod, they are forced to share the primary immersion tank, completely naked, their minds linked through a fragile neural bridge.
The only way to drive the crippled rig up a steep mountain slope is to open their mental firewalls and merge their consciousnesses into a single, dual-brained entity. In the absolute blackness of the deep, they feel each other's exhaustion, fear, and a long-buried attraction that the corporate protocols were designed to prevent. As they race against a benthic current that will sweep them into the abyss, the line between survival and desire dissolves.
Tartarus 9 is a slow-burn sci-fi erotic novella about two pilots who discover that the most dangerous variable isn't the ocean. It's the person on the other side of the neural bridge. You can expect explicit tactile and verbal consent, neurodivergent-friendly sensory grounding, proximity through technical necessity, ordinary bodies, and a career-saving resolution. Five years in the dark, and we finally found the light.
Wordcount 18, 780