H2LiftShips - Beyond Luna (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781644562376)

H2LiftShips- Beyond Luna

Captain Graciela was master of her own fate, far from her controlling family in a solar sail cargo ship, trading and gambling throughout the heliosphere. Her small crew on the H2LiftShip, the LunaCola, was all the help she needed: Jack, a talking dog with a nose for Earth jerky, Tang, a poker obsessed orangutang, and Octopus, in his watery navigation station.

Strong, finely woven nano-spider cloth, filled with hydrogen, haul H2LiftShips to the edge of Earth before being transformed into kilometers-wide solar sails. The same fabric, on return, is a parasail, flying the ship to the aerodrome in the desert. Commerce is the name of the game in this saga and everything has a value. Heat generated from the collection of molecules and garbage surrounding the planet is captured in radiators and sold to the planetary electric grid as a bonus for the crew.

The crew was anxious for some 'me' time after being in the void for too long.

Tang was ready to double his money in Las Vegas, Octopus planned a coastal shopping trip for live fish, clams, and eggs. Finally, Graciela and Jack were on an epic road trip looking for cargo for the asteroid mines.

It wasn't all fun and games for the vast population inhabiting the heliosphere. Asteroids societies were structured on what the sentients knew best, small city-states hanging in the void. Ponos is an injured miner and has to fall back to gig work as he recovers. He was lucky to make enough to cover food and waste handling on the jobs he could find. Find out how he connects with his old pirate captain and makes a break from the daily grind of a workologists on a cold, isolated rock.

Lead had more value than gold and was hard to find in the asteroids. Mushrooms, infused with lead, protected all living-chambers, lightly glowing as cosmic rays bounce around the mycelium, changing states for all concerned. Every sentient and most machines use DNA-computers, which store petabytes of data and interface any sensing device. These semi-sentient bioGels suffered in their growth tanks as cosmic rays blasted billions of neural paths into existence, sending a flash of pain throughout the gel. It was no better after leaving their growing chambers and being sold in the wider heliosphere. Every sensor interaction required a fine needle shoved through their one-millimeter-wide edge and suppressed anger was their normal existence.

There were no avoiding family issues as Graciela met her mother on some distant rock. Her mother's controlling passive-aggressive nature shown through as she continued playing pranks on her daughter

Would Graciela rescue her mother from a kidnapping by pirates and win it all in a rigged card game?

Find out in the first volume of the H2LiftShip series - Beyond Luna.