**The dawn on Mercury never stops. Marco Ansel just did.**

When a transfer cradle explodes on Mercury's nightside, junior tech Marco Ansel wakes up in a wrecked skiff, eleven hours after his fleet swept the debris, signed the paperwork, and drove on. They can't turn around. The mining line survives by pacing the planet's slow-rolling sunrise, and the sunrise is now seven hundred kilometers behind Marco — and coming. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't eat. It has never once stopped for anybody.

Marco has a crippled skiff with five hundred kilometers left in it, four bottles of export gas, a hundred and eighty days of rations, and his dead uncle's elderly, furious cat. Every rule of the line says the same thing: never stop moving. Marco is going to break it. On purpose. He's going to stop, and dig, and let the deadliest sunrise in the solar system roll right over him.

Seven hundred kilometers away, the fleet's most hated officer refuses to close a file. Four bottles are missing from a debris field that's too light, and Chief Nadia Okri does not write off what she cannot verify — even when the fleet reprimands her for it, even when the only ally she can find is the insurance adjuster sent to certify a dead man cheap.

A survival epic told in ledgers, log entries, and one unpayable invoice, OVERTAKEN is hard science fiction the way it's meant to be done: every number real, every gram counted, and everything that matters riding on the arithmetic. For readers who love competence under pressure, found families of exactly two, and heroes who price what they love — because pricing is the respect.