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.

With an assassin of the mercenary order of St Bleyth vowing to kill both Tallith Min and Wil Litang, they didn’t need more enemies. But they found them, nonetheless – the Navy of Despar and its sentient berserker, the Order of Despar bent on revenge, and even the mercenary branch of St Bleyth. Escape seemed most unlikely.

The Enemies of the Lost Star opens with the Lost Star’s voyage into the Drifts to deliver its cargo of guard boats to Zilantre. The long voyage is not without several harrowing incidents, and upon arrival, they are offered a cargo they cannot afford to turn down – a mercenary crew of jump-fighters to the Bascone Reef, whose worlds are under siege by the space forces of Despar. Things don’t go as planned, and the Lost Star finds itself with enemies, old and new...

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.