Please note – A version of this novel was previously published as part of an omnibus edition – The Lost Star Stories Volume One, The Bright Black Sea. If you have read that book – thank you – you have already read this story.

When Wil Litang was named acting captain of the space freighter Lost Star, he could never have imagined that one day the Lost Star would take him and his shipmates to its namesake – the mythical Tenth Star of the Nine Star Nebula. And what they would find there.

The Captain of the Lost Star opens with the dying long-time captain of the space freighter Lost Star appointing his first mate, Wil Litang, acting captain. He is to take the ship around the star Azminn, calling on half a dozen planets for cargo along the way. Little did Litang know, when he accepted the post, that the Lost Star had a mysterious and deadly past, a past that was about to catch up with it.

The old captain dies soon after the Lost Star sails from Calissant, as does the ship’s co-owner. To make matters worse, interplanetary trade had fallen into one of its periodic crashes. Their return to Calissant will likely mean that the ship will be laid up, and Litang and his shipmates will be laid off. On Calissant, he finds that the new owner of the Lost Star, Tallith Min, is a target of an assassin out of that mysterious past – and it seems, so is he. Desperate times call for desperate measures to not only escape that deadly past but also to keep the ship and its crew profitably employed. Even if it means sailing into the “lawless” Drifts.

The Lost Star Stories take classical space opera motifs – rocket ships, space pirates, sentient robots, strange alien worlds, and mysterious dangers, and combine them with richly drawn characters and contemporary sensibilities to create a modern, character-focused space adventure series.

This story is set in the Nine Star Nebula, a tiny, but dense nebula, a remnant of a supergiant star that shed much of its mass in a not-so-supernova. Formed out of this dense soup of material are eight regular stars and a thick cloud of dust, gas, asteroids, and free planets, known as the Drift. Each of the eight stars has planetary rings of dozens of planets, often with ten to twenty inhabitable – and inhabited. The nebula was settled 40,000 years prior to this story by slower-than-light settlement ships from our Solar System. The eight stars are in such close proximity to each other as to allow for travel between them at sub-light speed, and so the original human settlers, of the genetically crafted “homo-stellar” variety, have settled most of the inhabited planets in all eight solar systems. They live under a single, very civilized, controlling, and security-minded government known as the Unity. However, as social safety-valves, the Unity allows dissenting societies, with their own rules, to exist on the moons within the Unity. And for those for whom even these small dissenting societies are too tame, there are, beyond the control of the Unity, all the uncounted asteroids and planets in the “lawless” Drift to settle. And somewhere in the Drift it is said that there is a Tenth Star, known as the Lost Star.