The Belt Books in Order

The Belt series takes place a few centuries in the future, after humanity has spread throughout the inner solar system. The asteroid belt is no longer an empty expanse of rock, but a busy region of mines, habitats, and trade routes linking Earth, Mars, and the outer colonies.

It begins with Entanglement, where Commander Scott McNabb and the small crew of the survey ship Hermes are quietly mapping rocks on the edge of civilisation, mostly so Scott can stay ahead of his debts. Their routine ends when they discover a derelict ship orbiting a binary asteroid and, inside it, a lost quantum device whose owner could reshape power across the system.

Salvaging that device should be their ticket to freedom. Instead it puts a target on their backs. In Entropy and Evolution the Hermes crew find themselves dragged into a growing struggle between human governments, ruthless corporations, and the quantum intelligences, or QIs, that help run the data networks binding the planets together. Missions that looked like simple retrieval jobs turn into battles over whether those AIs will be allowed to talk to one another again.

As the story widens, the focus shifts to Luca Lee McNabb, a young woman with a unique biology that makes her both valuable and dangerous. In Enigma she is forced to flee Earth for New World One, a vast habitat under construction out in the Belt, while the powerful VanHeilding family send augmented hackers, known as node runners, to hunt her through the data grid.

Exodus and Emergence push the conflict to its breaking point. Luca struggles with the psychological cost of what she has become, Scott and Miranda are torn between protecting their found family and the wider Belt, and uprisings in places like the Elektra system challenge the corporate empires that have treated ordinary workers as expendable.

Throughout, The Belt keeps one foot in hard science, with plausible spacecraft, orbital mechanics, and communications tech, and one foot in character driven adventure. It is a series about survival on the frontier, but also about information, who controls it, and how one small crew and one young woman end up at the centre of a struggle for the future of human civilisation.