Not a Prison Ship

By A.C. Ellas

With their ship disguised as a tramp freighter, Captain Nick Steele, Astrogator Cai and the crew of Laughing Owl serve as bait to catch a pirate preying on the ships traveling the silk road. Their orders are to disable and capture the pirates so that admiralty can interrogate them. Both the pirate ship and the Laughing Owl soon realize they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. Will the pirates succeed in their attempts to take over Laughing Owl? Or will Nick and Cai manage to defeat their foe despite an unexpected betrayal?

• Language: English
• Publisher: eXtasy Books Inc
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781487403416

Book preview

Sometimes, the bait fights back.

With their ship disguised as a tramp freighter, Captain Nick Steele, Astrogator Cai and the crew of Laughing Owl serve as bait to catch a pirate preying on the ships traveling the silk road. Their orders are to disable and capture the pirates so that admiralty can interrogate them. Both the pirate ship and the Laughing Owl soon realize they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. Will the pirates succeed in their attempts to take over Laughing Owl? Or will Nick and Cai manage to defeat their foe despite an unexpected betrayal?

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Not A Prison Ship

Copyright © 2016 A.C. Ellas

ISBN: 978-1-4874-0341-6

Cover art by Carmen Waters

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

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Devine Destinies, an imprint of eXtasy Books Inc

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Smashwords Edition

Not A Prison Ship

Astrogator Book Six

By

A.C. Ellas

Chapter One

Time stood on its head as Cai stretched seconds into long minutes, the number storm surrounding him in a dazzling display of symbolic logic and n-dimensional arrays. Half his mind, supported by the augmentation of his adjuncts, concentrated on the complex calculations of jump mechanics. A sliver of his mind paid attention to external sensors and the internal jump alarms and the voice insisting that everyone be in their couches now, now, now.

The rest of him was turned inward, reaching mental hands into the heart of the Laughing Owl, finding that space beyond knowing, beyond space-time, a quantum gap where all was in flux, everything was in potential, a cloud of the possible and the impossible, light and dark, left and right, positive and negative. Here, Cai touched, and in touching, effected. Time and space twisted in upon itself, the impossible shift of matter to energy to matter without change in form or function. Cai was still Cai, but Cai was no longer Cai. Laughing Owl impossibly soared down the sloping membrane of subspace, space inverted, in a flux state of physics gone mad.

Cai leaped the chasm yawning at his metaphoric feet, the gap between stars, avoiding the beckoning siren call of the distant quasar, the ominous basso rumble of the nearby black hole, and he grabbed the edge of the system he wanted and by force of will pulled himself up the slope toward the white heart of the star in the center. Stabilized, he reached into the heart of himself a second time and untwisted what he had impossibly twisted, and once more, Laughing Owl broke free, bursting forth from subspace like a bird taking flight as all about him streamers of scintillating energy disbursed across the electromagnetic spectrum—the calling card of a jump, a flaring beacon of energy that said someone passed this way.

Some of the more subtle perturbations would take months to dissipate below the threshold of most sensors, and Cai had heard that there were sensors able to detect the traces of a jump years later—so long as no other jumps had occurred since, since a new jump tended to obliterate the traces of the old. Cai pushed his errant thoughts aside and ran through his checks, starting with navigation—was he where he thought he was? He took a virtual snapshot of the star at the center of the system, matched its spectroscopic fingerprint against what was expected, and once that test was passed, he triangulated based on the position of certain globular clusters and other stable galactic signposts.

With his position off the outer marker for Eridani confirmed, Cai did a quick systems check. The more thorough check would occur later; for now, Cai just needed to know that all his parts and systems were in the green. He set a course for the system’s outermost asteroid belt as he double checked his disguise. To all appearances—electronic,