Long Orbit

A repair station at the quiet edge of the solar system. A cat who is always right. An engineer who wasn't planning to stay.

The cat's name is Ptolemy. He's twelve years old, genetically adapted for low gravity, and he has been Dock Meridian's quality inspector for as long as anyone can remember. He assesses a repair by sitting on it. He indicates a problem by sitting near it. When the work is good, he sits somewhere else entirely. The crew has learned to read him. He is usually right.

Ptolemy is not the strangest thing about this shabby repair station in Jupiter orbit. That would be the three maintenance drones - forty years old, manufacturer long gone, no replacement parts and no way to know anymore where their programming ends and something else begins. The oldest one stopped accepting scheduled maintenance years ago. Nobody has decided what that means. Nobody is in a hurry to.

Into this arrives Saoirse Vanthoorn: an engineer with a good record, a bad history, and a firm intention to work her six-month contract and leave before anyone learns her name. She's good at leaving. She's had practice.

What she isn't ready for is a dock that keeps thirty years of records, a crew who express care in ways she has to learn to read, and a cat whose opinion of her is still, quietly, forming.

The Long Orbit is the first book in the Dock Meridian series: cozy science fiction about competence, repair, and the specific people - and machines, and one cat - you stay for without meaning to. For fans of Becky Chambers, Nathan Lowell, and Meredith Katz.