The Patchwork Starship

By Jessi Hammond

Olwen had gone into the Daintree Rainforest to be by herself for a while and sort through her life.

Only to find her life taking a direction she'd never imagined when she suddenly finds herself on board a starship.

But Olwen's not the only newcomer on board, and she has to join with two odd-looking aliens to save both themselves and the ship.

Or she'll never be able to get home…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Aug 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516308330

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About this book

Olwen had gone into the Daintree Rainforest to be by herself for a while and sort through her life.

Only to find her life taking a direction she’d never imagined when she suddenly finds herself on board a starship.

But Olwen’s not the only newcomer on board, and she has to join with two odd-looking aliens to save both themselves and the ship.

Or she’ll never be able to get home…

The Patchwork Starship

One

Olwen Chambers loved the rainforest.

This part of the Daintree was away from the usual tourist haunts, an hour’s drive and a brisk half-hour hike along a tiny, almost invisible path used only by locals who knew it was there – and those were few and far between. Dense greenery surrounded Olwen, crowding along the sides of the path; fern fronds stroked her arms as she passed, kauri pines waved branches high above her, and mosses streaked the rocks scattered across the forest floor. The smell of moist dirt rose to meet her nostrils as she walked. Here in the Daintree Rainforest were some of the oldest plants on Earth – or so her cousin Roy, who worked for the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, had told her.

Roy, who’d warned her two months ago that Brett was a no-good player and not worth her time.

But Olwen hadn’t listened. Brett had swept her off her feet. Tall, blond, incredibly handsome, and somehow knowing all the right things to say to a shy seventeen-year-old just out of high school and working at her first job as a hotel receptionist.

Looks like he’d known all the right things to say to a fair few girls, and they’d succumbed to his charms a lot faster than Olwen had, and gone a lot further with him too.

At least she wasn’t pregnant like Kylie.

Olwen took a deep breath against the rising anger and hurt. The air was fresh here, clean, full of bark and leaf and mossy smells. She wished it could clean out her memories as fast as it cleared her nose of the smells of civilisation.

Funny how she’d never come out here, even though she lived so close, until three months ago when Roy had asked her to help him collect samples on the weekend. And now it was her favourite place for getting away from everyone and everything for a few hours.

Maybe she should go for that traineeship in QPWS Roy had told her about.

Collecting samples had been surprisingly fun. And the work sounded a lot better than dealing with people all day.

The rock pool was just as she remembered it. Sometime in the distant past, water had bubbled free of the earth and made itself a channel across the rainforest floor before joining the Daintree River about three kilometres to the west. But here, maybe because the ground was softer, or there had been