OFF-NOMINAL
A luxury orbital hotel is failing. Everyone in charge insists it isn’t.
All systems remain nominal.
Meridian Station was built to make space feel safe. Five hundred guests and crew. Artificial gravity. An AI named Echo that never lies, and never quite tells the truth.
Engineer Mara Vance has noticed.
Meridian is falling, and everyone in a position to say so is smoothing it over.
In orbit, every system has a failure threshold.
So does every human being.
Alan Kepler
Alan Kepler writes science fiction about people under pressure and the future they build anyway.
Off-Nominal is the first novel in the Orbitfall series.
Survival starts when the plan stops working.
Near-future hard science fiction set aboard Meridian Station, a luxury orbital habitat pushed beyond the limits its owners promised would never be reached. Off-Nominal begins the story.