The Kitra Saga #2
by
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 Hugo Finalist Lorelei Esther.
- 1 Read list
Publisher: Journey Press
Illustrators:
Genres:
Tropes: Cross-Species Friendships, Cryosleep, Found Family, FTL, Galactic Civilization, Interstellar Travel, Person in Distress, Space Medicine, Space Pilot
Word Count: 60000
Setting: Space, for the most part
Languages Available: English
Series Type: Continuous / Same Characters
Tropes: Cross-Species Friendships, Cryosleep, Found Family, FTL, Galactic Civilization, Interstellar Travel, Person in Distress, Space Medicine, Space Pilot
Word Count: 60000
Setting: Space, for the most part
Languages Available: English
Series Type: Continuous / Same Characters
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.”
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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?”
COLLAPSEBased on my positive review of Kitra , the previous book in the series (and, happily, it does look like becoming a series), the author contacted me to alert me to the fact that this one was going on Netgalley. He told me that, if anything, it was a better book.
I don't know if I think it's better (we are probably using different criteria), but it's certainly good. It's firmly in the tradition of the grand old early-Heinlein and Andre Norton space opera "juveniles," but updated; women exist (if you think I'm joking, read Norton's Sargasso of Space ), they have equal agency, and apparently all the crew apart from the alien are bisexual - though romance and sex are given passing mention and serve as an emotional complication during the action, rather than being a focus at all.
It walks a mostly successful tightrope between not allowing the tropes of the genre to pop up anything too egregiously against known science and not falling into the complexities of hard SF, which keeps the action moving. There were a couple of moments when I questioned the likelihood of a dramatic event that seemed to rely on engineers failing to think about safety measures to any degree whatsoever, or wondered why there were space princesses; I'm not generally a fan of princesses (literal or figurative) in fiction, and I find the idea of a revival, in a space-opera setting, of the long-superseded political organization that was aristocracy unlikely at best. It's a popular trope, though, and I ended up ignoring it, since it didn't affect the plot materially, and just enjoying the story.
There are tense moments, rescues, escapes, all the good action stuff, but with a cast that isn't made up of action heroes, so they have to work hard at it and there's always the sense they could fail. The plot does rely on one coincidence (arriving at the right place at the right time to make a difference, by complete chance), but again I'll let it go, because overall, this is a well-paced, varied, exciting, well-executed YA space opera featuring principled, courageous and capable protagonists.
Recommended.
