The Ship's Doctor: Adventures of Coryn Astridottir: Ship's Doctor, #1

By Charlie Nash

A sci-fi novelette of space medicine, mercenaries and machines. 

The ship's doctors are a new class of professional, medicos with implanted intuition for the organic mega-spacestations of the future. It's an ability that comes with loneliness, and strange compulsions. Still, this should have been an easy job: just a trip to the furthest-flung blue-class station for a basic malfunction. What the Doctor finds is a dead colleague, an infected core and Riley, a grafted flight engineer who knows something about her past. What follows is quarantine, a mercenary coup, and threat to spread the infection across the verse. Will the she make it out? Or sacrifice all for the station? 

Originally published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and now re-released.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flying Nun Publications
• Release date: Jan 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524248307

Book preview

Also by Charlie Nash

Coryn Astridottir Stories

Dellinger, Use Only As Directed, 2014 (Peggy Bright Books)

Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award (Best Science Fiction Short Story)

Waygate, 2020 (Flying Nun Publications – FNP)

Collections

Men and Machines I: space operas and special ops, 2019 (FNP)

Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award (Best Collection)

Men and Machines II: punks and postapocalypticans, 2019 (FNP)

All Your Dark Faces, 2019 (FNP)

Other Short Stories

Deep Deck 9, Luna Station Quarterly #10, 2012

The Edge, Scareship #8, 2012

Jack, Mysterical-E, Fall/Winter 2012/2013

Parvaz, Dreaming of Djinn, 2013 (Ticonderoga Publications)

Tartarus, Electric Spec, Volume 8, Issue 2, 2013

The Message, Dimension6 #1, 2014

Blue ICE, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #59, 2014

The Ghost of Hephaestus, Phantazein, 2014 (FableCroft)

Shortlisted for the Ditmar Award (Best Novella or Novelette)

Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award (Best Fantasy Short Story)

Alchemy and Ice, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #61, 2015

Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award (Best Science Fiction Short Story)

The Seven-forty from Paraburdoo, The Never Never Land, 2015 (Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild)

Flash Fiction

The Two Boys, Every Day Fiction, 3 July 2011

Migration, The Journal of Microliterature, 22 January 2013

The One You Feed, One Page: Brisbane, 20 January 2014

The Lady with the Lantern, Pseudopod Episode 428, 6 March 2015

The Last Gate is the First

Longlisted for the 2018 BWF UQ Microfiction competition

Find all stories at charlienash.net

First published by Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #47 in 2010, originally credited as by Charlotte Nash

This edition published in 2018 by Flying Nun Publications, http://flyingnunpublications.com/

Original Australian spelling retained.

Copyright © 2010, 2013, 2018 Charlie Nash

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

charlienash.net

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part thereof) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations) in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical or other forms not yet conceived), or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise), without prior written permission from the author.

Cover design by Jeanelle Bennet

Proofreading by Kevin Stewart

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or people, living or dead, is coincidental.

Contents

Also by Charlie Nash

The Ship’s Doctor

About the author

The Ship’s Doctor

Adventures of Coryn Astridottir #1

Charlie Nash

This is the way it always ends.

My cheek burns from his stubble and blood rushes to my head. Got up too fast, but we’re five minutes from port. I grope for my trousers under the covers. They’re crunched down below the bed end, inside-out, cast off in a rush. I turn them by feel, then go after my shirt. Be gone before he’s back.

I hear him cleaning up