The Shared Sky: A Shackleton Base Story - Hub Era, Book Two

A Shackleton Base Story - Hub Era, Book Two

Shackleton Base is racing to build something new: solar collectors manufactured on the Moon and launched into orbit, where sunlight never has to fight through an atmosphere or a night cycle. But Halcyon Dynamics isn't the only company chasing the idea. Forty kilometers away, a rival - Meridian Orbital - is building the exact same thing, on the exact same deadline.

Nobody at either company wants to admit it, but the two operations are sharing a lot more than a launch schedule. When Mira Okafor and her crew flag an untracked object drifting near the deployment corridor, both sides shrug it off as somebody else's problem. Halcyon's liaison says it's probably Meridian's. Meridian's liaison says it's probably Halcyon's. Nobody's lying. Nobody's watching, either - until the gap between two competing companies nearly costs two people their lives.

With days left before the next crewed launch, Mira, Alex, and the rest of the crew have to do something neither company has managed on its own: get two rivals to trust a shared fix, before the sky above Shackleton runs out of room for two separate stories about who's responsible for what.

Nobody's the villain here. That's what makes it hard.

Grounded in real research on orbital debris tracking, space-based solar power, and how competing companies coordinate - or fail to - on shared safety infrastructure, The Shared Sky continues the Shackleton Base series with the same rigor, the same crew, and a question that gets harder to answer the higher the stakes climb: what do two rivals actually owe each other, once they're standing under the same sky?