The Perihelion Drovers

The drive don’t care about your feelings. It only cares about whether you show up.

Mara Calloway has spent twenty-three years driving grav-elk through the Kepler Belt—and four years avoiding the one route that killed her partner. Now she’s said yes to a Perihelion run.

Two thousand engineered megafauna. Eight crew members—a weathered trail boss, a reckless young swing rider, a cook who’s heir to the whole operation, a near-silent drag rider who the animals trust more than any human, and a scientist who came to document the drive and is starting to suspect the herd is doing something no one has a framework to understand. A corporate rival who will do whatever it takes to control the Belt’s supply chain. And a narrow storm window that will close in fourteen days.

Set in the far reaches of an asteroid belt eleven light-years from Earth, The Perihelion Drovers is a space western about the hardest kind of work—the kind that changes you slowly, until one day you look back and realise you are not who you were when you started. It is a novel about grief that does not resolve into recovery, but into something more honest: the ability to carry it and go to work anyway. About an AI companion who knows, with perfect precision, that she is afraid. About animals who turn out to have been speaking all along, in a language no one thought to listen for.

It is also, simply, the story of a drive—the dust and the danger and the strange, exhausted beauty of moving through an ancient, indifferent universe with a crew of people who are becoming, without quite meaning to, a family.

Perfect for readers of Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie, and anyone who has ever loved something they didn’t fully understand.

📖 88 pages