The Harmonic Meridian

About this book

In the Asterchord Belt, a vibrant ring of inhabited micro-moons orbiting a blue giant star, interstellar travel relies on Resonants—pilots trained to navigate deadly magnetic storms through plasma resonance. Mara Vance, a twenty-two-year-old junior Resonant, treats her dangerous work as an exacting craft rather than a mystic calling. When a routine convoy suffers an impossible navigational failure, Mara uncovers a conspiracy: the Belt's Transit Authority is selling pilot data to Helix Meridian, a corporation developing an algorithmic autopilot to replace human crews. As Helix prepares a live demonstration of their automated system during the high-stakes Founding Regatta, Mara realizes the algorithm is critically flawed and will likely lead to a massacre in the Belt's most volatile rift. Unwilling to watch her home be destroyed by corporate negligence, she assembles a ragtag crew including Ivo Sato, a brilliant ballast engineer, Captain Samira Oke, a pragmatic freighter pilot, and Dr. Eren Dlamini, a deaf astrophysicist who feels the stars through tactile arrays. Together, they must expose the flaw in the machine and prove that survival in the storm requires a human touch.