The Apprentice of the Comet Harvester
A Novel

About this book:

Nineteen-year-old Lars Thorne has spent half his life in the grease-stained orbital yards of Pallas Staging Station, cutting apart rust-bucket tugs while the real ships sail past the edge of the belt. His hands are scarred, his coveralls soaked in machine oil, and he knows the language of pistons, flanges, and oxy-arc torches better than any academy graduate. But Lars doesn’t want to spend his life breathing iron dust on scrap duty. He wants to serve aboard something that actually matters.

When the *Aethelgard* docks—a hulking, scarred comet harvester built more like a floating factory than a spacecraft—legendary Master Mechanic Vane issues an open call for apprentices. No diplomas, no slack. Only kids who can read metal and don’t flinch at the heat. Selected over polished cadets from Ceres, Lars trades his cutting torch for Berth 404 aboard a steam-powered leviathan built to grapple billion-ton icebergs screaming through the void at forty kilometers a second. Here, in the sub-zero coma of a long-period comet, there are no telemetry scans, only raw iron, hissing steam, and the brutal math of survival.

From the freezing dark beyond perihelion to the melting core of an ancient ice rock, Lars must earn his Journeyman’s Mark under Vane’s unforgiving eye. The void does not forgive sloppy welds or hesitant hands, and the *Aethelgard*’s warped hull hides scars from outgassing events that would break lesser crews. For a yard rat who once watched sparks fall like dying stars, the greatest harvest isn’t heavy water or oxygen—it’s becoming someone the machines trust. A gritty, blue-collar journey into the cold, where every rivet tells a story and only the toughest apprentices make it back.