This is so exciting! It’s release day for ASTRAY and with it I begin my new sci-fi series, The Adventures of a Xeno-Archaeologist. New series = extra-nervous author. But the nerves are totally worth it. This series has so much potential. I hope it captures your imagination and you become as eager as I am for more of Nora and her complicated world. Royalty, pirates, exiled humanity. Aliens, androids and AIs. And that’s just the beginning!

Ancient alien technology stranded the original colonists far from home. Now, they are an interstellar force. Perhaps it’s time to escape their exile. But not everyone wants to rejoin humanity. Some people have everything to lose.

Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VW36YZD/

Blurb

Nora Devi is a xeno-archaeologist with a complicated past. She has buried more secrets than she’s dug up. Widowed in the recently ended twelve year war between Capitoline and Palantine, she now makes a living as an independent tagger in border space.

Captain Liam Kimani could be credited with ending the latest royal war. Instead, he’s blamed for it. Dirty commoners aren’t meant to lay their hands on royalty.

He has no regrets.

When Liam and his crew of the battlecruiser, RC Genghis Khan, are exiled to Capitoline’s border they discover that life in unexplored space can be more dangerous than war, and that their best chance of survival lies with a mysterious, elusive tagger.

The only problem is that Nora’s secrets might destroy the precarious stability of the entire Human Sector.

Astray is a fast-paced, enthralling space opera of lost societies, ancient aliens, rugged warriors and semi-legal pirates.

Excerpt

Old habits died hard.

Skipping out ahead of the battlecruiser RC Genghis Khan’s arrival was the sort of action that raised suspicions. Nora had traveled out to the border with the intention of shaking off her former life and its constraints, but childhood survival training proved hard to ignore. Blending in to avoid notice had been the name of the game in the tenements of Angkor back on Capitoline.

She justified staying an extra week by cleaning the atmosphere recycling unit on her ship, the CC Kangaroo. It was a dirty, maddening job that she’d previously left to the cleaning robots, but after six days of crawling around, bashing her knuckles, head and knees on various parts of the system, she was surprised at the satisfaction she felt at knowing her air wasn’t merely clean, it all but sparkled.

When she entered the spaceship’s garden chamber, she imagined the plants fluttered happy leaves.

“You’re losing it, girl.”

Talking to yourself was an occupational hazard for solo travelers.

As a venerable class IX scout, the CC Kangaroo could comfortably carry four people, and effectively support double that number. However, the failed treasure hunter whom Nora had bought it from, had restored the CC Kangaroo with an emphasis on solo travel. After his expensive investment in an upgraded ship’s operating system, it had been his loss and Nora’s gain when he’d discovered he couldn’t survive the loneliness and uncertainty of soloing in deep space. His health had cracked.

Nora could have changed the scout’s name when she transferred its registration to herself on Timor. Unlike its former owner, she wasn’t a proud Viminal, proclaiming her identity by association with such iconic animals as kangaroos, wallabies and wombats. However, Kangaroo was the perfect name for a scout ship. It leapt ahead of mining, trade and settlement, and it could stash small finds in a metaphorical pocket; that is, its cargo hold.

Since she was still on-station, moored at the Gretel Loop, there was an obvious cure for her talking to herself. She should go out and socialize.

“Before the plants start talking back.”

READ ON: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VW36YZD/