Sling

A certified road should have carried Open Palm safely past the Pilgrim. Instead, one uncharted moonlet leaves the independent ferry gravitationally trapped around a rogue super-Jovian—with six people aboard, no rescue geometry, and too little fuel for any conventional escape that ends somewhere survivable. Then twenty-three recovered flight cores begin to speak. Not with one voice. Not as ghosts. In broken warnings, clock errors, unfinished calculations, and the work of crews who never knew one another, they reveal the Black Lace: a route assembled across decades by people who did not live to fly it. For apprentice pilot Kite Adebayo, the archive leads to the mother who vanished in the Harrow sixteen years ago. For archivist Edda Ro, it exposes the danger she helped an institution bury. And for captain Ansa Rook—a slinger who has built her life around always keeping an exit open—the final instruction asks the impossible. Stop trying to escape. Allow one complete orbit. Let the planet hold the ship long enough for a moon named Morrow to throw it free. SLING is a character-driven science-fiction survival novel about orbital mechanics, damaged testimony, working lives, and the difference between being influenced and being owned.