Imagine a perfect city on Mars: clean atriums, trees in the upper galleries, children born under a red sky.

Now imagine that when something goes wrong, the air arrives in a particular order, and your place in that order was decided long before you started gasping.

Episode three of The Iron Road Reader is a backstage tour. Instead of one long reading, I open up the machinery of The Hohmann Corridor, my four-book science-fiction universe, and show you the gears turning, with short excerpts from book one, The Breathing Class, doing their terrible, quiet work along the way.

You will hear the opening, where a flight engineer tastes copper behind her teeth while every gauge reads green, because “the machine is being polite,” and the vehicle is “lying without intent.”

You will learn why the series is named for a real piece of orbital mechanics: the Hohmann transfer window that opens between Earth and Mars once every 780 days. You will also see how a man who owns the schedule, the fuel, and the priority list never needs to build a prison:

“The solar system does the holding, and the Corridor decides who is exempt from it.”

We will walk the three ports: Hainan, the Earth launch city the workers call Mehra City; Eutopia, the lunar tollbooth where delay is a form of power; and Providence, the genuine home on Mars whose air, hull, and right to leave are owned by someone else.

We will open the air-rank dashboard: “That is better air.”

We will meet the founder, Rajan Mehra, dangerous precisely because half of what he says is true.

And we will sit with the Oracle, a decision model that is not evil, not alive, and more frightening for it. The model answered the question humans taught it to ask, and the question excluded the people being sacrificed.

This is not a space adventure. It is a competence thriller about evidence, about dashboards that lie without intent, and about the people those lies are designed to spend.

If that is your kind of book, The Breathing Class is out now.

Find it, plus my socials and every book link, at AdamVahn.com, and join the newsletter at adamvahn.kit.com.

Next stop: one small change to history, and a continent of dominoes.