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.

The Lost Star has its share of ghosts, from its drunken former engineer to the eerie dragons of deep space, where reality is stretched thin. But there is yet another ghost to come who will lead the Lost Star and its crew to its namesake, the Tenth Star.

In The Ghosts of the Lost Star, Litang and his crew, barely escaping from Despar, decide, for their safety, that the Lost Star must be considered lost. The Lost Star becomes the Starry Sea, with an invented backstory. To avoid anyone recognizing the Lost Star, they sail to a new solar system to refit and take up a new trade. All to little avail, as old and new ghosts out of the past discover and draw them into fulfilling the Lost Star’s destiny – a desperate mission to its namesake, the legendary Tenth Star, the Lost Star, hidden deep in the darkest nebula. What exactly this mission is and what this Lost Star is defies their wildest imaginations.

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.