Let’s talk about Nicole Gordon, the salvage pilot at the heart of THE LAST ORBIT, because few protagonists have ever earned the “badass” moniker quite like her.

First, the obvious: Nicole doesn’t just survive in space’s most hostile junkyard, she owns it. The Graveyard Orbit is where dreams (and ships) go to die, but Nicole’s the one threading her battered Tethys through debris fields and radiation storms, outmaneuvering corporate security and drones that would flatten anyone else. Her ship? It’s basically a haunted house of failing tech, yet she makes it move like a knife through butter.

But her badassery isn’t all brute force or pilot swagger, it’s precision. Nicole’s got that rare, ice-in-the-veins clarity under pressure. When the alarms blare, she makes hard calls in seconds. She can rewire a comm system mid-chase, patch a hull breach with the heel of her boot, and talk down a panicked partner with one clipped sentence. She’s a systems thinker, always three steps ahead, whether she’s dodging drones or corporate kill-codes.

What pushes her from “tough” into “legend”? Her refusal to quit, even when the universe (literally) erases her. Nicole’s been burned by her past, exiled from everything she was trained to trust. She’s haunted by trauma—her own disgrace, gaps in memory, the knowledge she might have been complicit in something monstrous. And yet, when faced with proof of mass erasure, she doesn’t look away. She acts. That’s the core of her badassery: relentless forward motion, even when every system—internal or external—wants her to freeze or fold.

Nicole’s also a badass because she’s human. She’s not a quip-machine or a space superhero. She’s scarred, literally and emotionally, her humor dry as the Martian surface. Her self-reliance is both armor and wound—she could use help, but trusting someone is a risk that frightens her more than any firefight. Watching her crack open, piece by piece, as the stakes rise? That’s why you root for her.

In a world built to erase the inconvenient, Nicole Gordon refuses to disappear. She’s a survivor, a resister, and maybe, just maybe, a redeemer. She doesn’t want to be a hero, but when the system gives her no choice, she grabs the controls and writes her own vector.

That’s the heart of THE LAST ORBIT. And that’s why Nicole Gordon is one of the most badass protagonists you’ll ever meet.