Peril Orbit

A young pilot becomes trapped in a tiny one-man spacecraft captured by the sun's gravity, forced into a tight, fuelless orbit as cooling systems fail and temperatures soar. He keeps technical logs, runs calculations to predict the inward spiral, and witnesses a small ice chunk vaporize against the ship, an event that accelerates his descent. Battling heat, exhaustion, and a fleeting impulse toward self-destruction restrained by training, he improvises and measures consequences as available options narrow, confronting the mechanical limits and mathematical inevitability of orbital decay and impending death.