The first chapter of Frank Leonard’s book ‘Flight of the Taka Tori’ has been released. You can read chapter 1 here. (We’ll be publishing a new chapter each Thursday – look at the bottom of this page).
The giant freighter Taka Tori, on a two year outbound from Ormon Three, carried eight giant cargo modules and eight crew. The other crew might tease Kell about being arachnid-girl but it wasn’t like she had a choice of assignment. You took the gig you were given or starved, that was life out in the Edge.
For three hundred years, the fold-engine had opened the Galaxy to unparalleled human expansion and the next generation of technology promised to be huger still. Transit times would be cut by a factor of ten and the implications for the billions of cargo hauls would be enormous. Instead there had been a prototype ship, a blink of intense light, and a eddying mass of expanding debris.
In space, there remained immutable truths: Corporations challenged one another for power, supremacy and the holy grail of market share. Egos, superstition and greed were alive and well. Ships were structured to be fully automated but a two point seven percent improvement in efficiency existed across fleet operations by adding a layer of human employment. Despite their unreliability, dishonesty and general fragility, humans were actually quite well engineered, good at problem solving and could think outside the box. Plus humans were readily available, cheap and disposable.
And most importantly, space might be a vacuum but it was full of the unexplained and unexpected that would turn around and bite you.
Oh, and the Taka Tori’s cargo included a million spiders
Chapter 1 is here.
Chapter 2 is here.