Dirt and Debt at Orbital Prices

About this book:

When the Consolidated Credit Corporation forecloses on the Vance family farm, they don't just take the land—they take the sky. Maeve Vance watches her family's red clay fields disappear beneath the thrusters of orbital recovery ships, her grandmother's heirloom seeds smuggled in her coat pocket and a fistful of living soil pressed against her heart. On the high-orbit staging rings, where every breath of air and drop of water carries a corporate price tag, the displaced farmers are nothing but surplus labor. But Maeve knows something the accountants in their rotating habitats have forgotten: dirt has memory. And she knows exactly how much pressure it takes to make something grow in the dark.

*Dirt and Debt at Orbital Prices* is a gritty, hope-fueled resistance story rooted in the calluses of generational knowledge. From the diesel cough of a dying combine to the sterile hum of a sovereign fleet, this novel follows three siblings stripped of their deed but not their craft—each carrying a different piece of the truth about what it means to tend something that refuses to die. Maeve's mechanical intuition, Silas's ledger-knowledge, and Clara's market savvy become weapons in a war waged not with guns, but with germination rates and nitrogen cycles.

At its core, this is a story about what corporations can never repossess: the patience to wait out a dry season, the stubbornness to coax life from soil that fights back, and the quiet certainty that no ledger can balance the weight of a single seed that remembers every hand that planted it. Perfect for readers of *The Expanse* and *Parable of the Sower* who want their science fiction grounded in mud, machinery, and the fierce, unglamorous work of keeping the future alive.