Not Past Redemption

By Scott Seldon

Seriala’s poor performance on one job has put her career as a starship pilot in jeopardy. With no other options, she has to take the only job available. Her new boss turns out to be Crazy Mags and at first she can’t see how it can work, but Mags is on a similar mission. Seriala must help Mags recover the logs and data records from a derelict starship so Mags can redeem her long tarnished name and Seriala can get her career back on track. Things aren’t so simple when a salvage operation gets in their way and endangers everything both of them are working for. Seriala must use every piloting trick she knows to succeed at the mission and to get her career back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Seldon
• Release date: Aug 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476341491

Scott Seldon

Scott Seldon lives in Colorado with his wife and family in a house brimming with old and new computers. He is a student of technology, history, anthropology, languages, and cosmology. Each separate direction of study has enriched his imagination, but he credits the creative output of George Lucas and Isaac Asimov for the direction it has taken. He turned his creativity to science fiction in his teens and has never looked back.In his writing, Scott strives to create rich worlds and characters. Although his stories take place in the future, he often looks to the past to give his stories a solid background. He’s is more likely to watch Captain Blood than Star Wars to find inspiration on the feel of a story. He reads the latest titles by Jack McDevitt followed by C. L. Moore’s stories of Northwest Smith written decades ago with Les Miserables and the Princess of Mars next on his reading list.

Book preview

Not Past Redemption

A Galactic Confederation Novella

Scott Seldon

Published by Arrano-Taldea Group

at Smashwords

2012

Discover other titles by Scott Seldon at

sites.google.com/site/scottrseldon

Arrano-Taldea Group is a collective association of independent authors of genre fiction. Each author accepts full responsibility for the content of their own publications. Please contact the author directly to report any problems with this ebook. [e-mail]

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

NOT PAST REDEMPTION

Copyright © 2012 by Scott Seldon

Cover Art by: Yotsuya

Visit him at: yotsuya-sama.deviantart.com

All rights reserved.

The copyright holder has licensed this ebook for use by a single reader. The reader may read this ebook using any compatible software or hardware and may copy this ebook to each such device they own and make reasonable backups. All other copying, hiring, lending, modification, reselling, or republishing, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited in accordance with US and international copyright laws.

ebook Edition

First Edition: May 2, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4763-4149-1

Revision 3

For my Darling wife

for her support and understanding through

endless hours of writing and revision.

Table of Contents

Not Past Redemption

Index

About the Author

Not Past Redemption

4607 GCE*

Seriala Doneva was still in shock. She was a good pilot, but because she had problems getting familiar with the model, she’d been fired. It was a fancy new Leywan Yards freighter with gravitic thrusters. It required a different set of skills to fly with those and she’d warned the captain before he hired her. Rather than give her the time to pick up the tricks, he’d fired her. More than anything she was angry, not only at herself for not picking it up fast enough, but at him for barely giving her two weeks to get the hang of it.

At least he’d paid her for a full month instead of just two weeks so she was set for a little while. Still, she’d have to do the rounds again and she hated that. But first she’d have to get to a port where she might find a position that would suit her. She used some of the money she’d been paid to catch a flight to Prahorus-Eshus, a planet toward the galactic core where she’d heard there were jobs to be had.

The flight took two days and when she disembarked she made arrangements for a room. There was no telling how long this would take and it was better to play it safe.

She had been at the top of her class in flight school and, until that finicky Leywanese ship, she had been able to fly anything she laid her hands on. She hadn’t expected that gravitic thrusters could be so sensitive. She’d gone from flight school to her apprenticeship and done extremely well, again earning a high recommendation. Then she’d landed a sweet position with a mining company as pilot on a medium freighter hauling ore from the asteroid mines in the Onaeza-Mattis system. Bad business decisions had ruined the company and left her unemployed two months ago, but far from broke.

She took a room at a decent priced hotel just outside the port and proceeded to begin her search for work. The first task was to find out who was on the hunt for a pilot and to get her name to placement agents. She wasn’t going to depend solely on the agents to find something so she began to gather a list of ships known to have an open pilot position.

Seriala didn’t compile simple lists. She always went with her gut and lumped the best positions with the ships scheduled to depart soonest. Once she’d omitted the ones who were exclusively going through a placement agent, she was left her with twelve. Within two hours she had gone to each of those twelve ships and found nothing. That was pretty normal for a first day.

* * *

A week later she still hadn’t made any progress and was beginning to get worried. There were plenty of pilot jobs, but they weren’t hiring her. She had years of experience and had a glowing recommendation from the mining company and she couldn’t see any reason why she wasn’t at least getting the chance of an interview.

She supposed one reason might be the standards she was setting. She sat down and reviewed some of the positions she was avoiding and confirmed that the ship, the captain, or some other aspect of the job had a bad reputation. She checked carefully so she didn’t discount a descent ship just based on one or two bad reports. The fact that none of the placement agencies were contacting her about these ships confirmed they weren’t ships she would want to serve on.

The next day she went to the offices of the Ventran Agency to see what they could