The Beast Healers of Orion's Fringe
A Novel of the First Empire

About this book:

In the grimy docks of the First Empire's fringe, the starships aren't built—they're born. Eighty-thousand-ton leviathans with cybernetic spines and fentanyl-drip nervous systems haul the Empire's commerce across the void, and when they break, Surgeon Maeve Tarrow cuts them open in zero-gravity to stitch their aortas, scrape radiation burns from their scales, and argue with bureaucrats who see living hulls as disposable inventory. She's good at her job. She's also the only thing standing between the Empire's insatiable freight quotas and a menagerie of suffering giants.

Maeve's crew is a chorus of cynics and true believers: Castor, who's spent thirty years elbow-deep in ventricular sludge and has the missing fingers to prove it; Jael, who reads a ship's terror in its neural weft like sheet music; Oren, the rookie who still thinks the Empire cares about its beasts; and Harlan, who just wants to pump bile without getting sued. Together they wage a quiet, dirty war—faking quarantines, sabotaging launch schedules, and jury-rigging biology to buy their patients three more days of survival against an institution that measures life in tonnage and transit times.

*The Beast Healers of Orion's Fringe* is *The Expanse* meets *James Herriot* in a pressure cooker: visceral, lived-in sci-fi where the medicine is real, the politics are lethal, and every surgical win feels like stealing fire from gods who only care about the manifest. If you've ever wanted a space opera where the ships have heartbeats—and the engineers have consciences—this is your berth.