By 2189, the Earth–Moon freight economy runs on rotating tethers that trade momentum as carefully as banks trade liquidity. Senior orbital-dynamics auditor Mara Quill trusts the numbers because conservation laws do not negotiate. Then Palisade’s ledger shows reserve its telemetry says cannot exist.
A routine discrepancy becomes a system-wide emergency. An independent pilot is blamed for missing momentum. Mara’s director restricts the audit. And a thirty-one-year-old certificate ties the impossible surplus to Leda—the habitat where Mara grew up, and where her brother still lives.
As freight windows close and life-support supply chains tighten, Mara must reconstruct what physically moved, who had authority to move it, and which promises were quietly promoted into facts. Every clean solution shifts the danger somewhere else.
Borrowed Orbit is a hard-SF systems thriller about orbital mechanics, institutional memory, and the political cost of pretending uncertainty has already been paid.
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