About Sirena:
One starship, six friends, 10,000 lives in the balance.
Hugo Award Finalist Gideon Marcus has done it again with this second installment in The Kitra Saga. Sirena is a thrilling YA space adventure, unusually hopeful and optimistic in a sea of grimdark, dystopian releases. Enhanced with beautiful illustrations, fans of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers and Emily Skrutskie’s Bonds of Brass will adore Sirena.
Young captain-for-hire Kitra Yilmaz has gotten her first contract: escort the mysterious Princess of Atlántida beyond the Frontier and find her a new world. It’s a risky job, fraught with the threat of pirates, dangerous squatters, and rising romantic tensions.
Still, Kitra and her crew are up for anything – until they find a lush world, perfect for settlement…with an enormous ghost ship already in orbit.
What secret does the crippled vessel hide? And is Kitra ready to take responsibility for its precious cargo?
With illustrations by Lorelei Esther.
Excerpt:
It took about an hour and a half at one-half a gee’s thrust to match orbits and close in on the mystery ship. By then, it was clear that there weren’t any colonies on the far side of the planet. There couldn’t be. The other hemisphere had no sizable land masses, though there were strings of archipelagos marking the tips of undersea mountain ranges. The back side of the planet was still mostly in shadow, but deep radar made it clear that there were no settlements of any size to be found. Marta was still coming up empty on the comm bands, too. All except the beacon on the bogey, the strange vessel, which we picked up more and more clearly as we approached: a set of chimes on three frequencies that said little more than “I’m here.”
From our new vantage, the outlines of the unidentified ship were crisp. The sun was now almost perpendicular to it, leaving the cylinder half-lit. The curved hull and the flat end of the bogey were somewhat but not entirely smooth; its projections stood out starkly against shadows so dark that they revealed nothing underneath. The whole thing was big, almost as big as the Trans-Rift ferry. It had to have crossed the Rift under its own power, which meant there was at least a Type 5 Drive in there somewhere. That made it military, government, or corporate owned. It didn’t look like any warship I’d ever seen.
“How close are we going to get?” Peter asked. He tried to keep his tone casual, but I heard the edge of nervousness.
“Close enough to know what’s going on,” I said simply. Then added quickly with a glance at Sirena, “If that’s alright with you.”
“I want to solve the mystery, too. Marta, is he still dead?”
“He?”
“The ship, darling. Ships are ‘he’ are they not?”
“She,” Fareedh murmured.
“Neither,” I said, a little too loudly. Peter suppressed a chuckle.
“Quite,” Sirena said after the briefest of pauses. “How is the ship?”
“I’m able to get a better map of emissions from here, though Peter would be better at explaining what they mean.”
“Right,” Peter said. He did something, and the bogey filled the screen. It was painted in a muted network of colors, mostly hoops that girdled the vessel. “There’s still power being generated. You can see the purple glow along the axis down at that one end. It’s being transmitted throughout the vessel, too. But if that engine’s as big as I think it is, it’s putting out too little energy to be in anything but standby mode.” Focusing on work had steadied his voice, or maybe a powered- down ship was less threatening.
“Oh, this is interesting,” I heard Fareedh say.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He was running a hand through his hair, one eyebrow raised. “If we can get close enough, or maybe inside, I can query their ship’s sayar. It’s got a public access channel.”
“You can’t do it from here?”
He shook his head. “Signal’s too weak. I can tell a connection can be made, but I can’t make one.”
I frowned. I hadn’t thought of actually boarding the thing. “How would we get in?”
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