The Comet Catcher of Callisto

About this book:

On Callisto, twelve-year-old Maya doesn't just drive the ice harvester—she keeps eight hundred people breathing. Every load of comet ice she hauls across the radiation-blasted plains buys the Asgard Basin colony another day of water, oxygen, and heat. But when a rogue Oort cloud nucleus the size of a mountain plunges toward Jupiter at forty-two kilometers per second, the routine supply run becomes a race against orbital mechanics. The comet isn't just passing through. It's cracking up, and the debris fan is aimed straight at the only home Maya has ever known.

With the colony's scrubbers failing, her uncle missing in the radiation belts, and Jupiter's magnetosphere turning the sky into a storm of static, Maya has to turn a fifteen-ton mining rig into a lifeboat. The math says the fragments hit in hours. The engineering says the domes won't hold. And the only way to save the people sleeping under three meters of regolith is to drive straight into the shadow of the gas giant—where the radiation kills unshielded electronics in minutes, and the ice hides secrets older than humanity.

*The Comet Catcher of Callisto* is hard science fiction at its most visceral: a survival thriller built on real orbital dynamics, cryogenic geology, and the brutal arithmetic of life support. For readers who loved *The Martian* and *Seveneves*—this is what it looks like when the frontier fights back.