Lendle

At the close of the Twenty-first Century, Lee Vidar is a switch pilot working for Starship Industries on the Callisto-Europa run. The job is easy: Lee picks up the Orion engines which will be used to power the first starships of Earth on the long voyage to the earthlike world of Hope, in the Alpha Centauri system. The engines are taken by tug to the midpoint of the run, where Lee hands off the dangerous cargo to another switch pilot and returns to Callisto. But on this run, nothing goes according to plan … and Lee’s sometime lover and old friend Johnny Dujon, is involved up to his eyeballs.

Nuts and bolts SF and an unexpected romance, set against the background of an overpopulated and ruined solar system, where the planet Hope is quite literally the last prayer Humanity has left … and humanity is in big trouble.