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Description:

Captain Jillian D'Lange is a woman with a promising future...until she gets caught in an explosion meant for someone else. Eight months later, she emerges from a coma only to find that the galaxy is a very different place. Her lover is dead, her new ship is three months shy of being confiscated, and she's now a cyborg with memory problems.

She's also the focal point of an investigation into corruption within the powerful Spacer's Union. The president of the SU believes that her memories are the key to unlocking the case and tries to bully her into submitting to psychotherapy. When she refuses, he blacklists her, and by doing so, forces her to take a job with a man whose people are ultra-religious technophobes.

The job lands her in the middle of a planetary power struggle, and triggers attempted murder, betrayal, and madness. Through it all, she's tortured by thoughts of who she was and what she is now and what she might yet become. This is a story full of intrigue and raw emotions. It is a story about mortals, and mortal failings, and what it takes to be human.

Excerpt:

Diamonds of light invaded her sleep, pinging her back from a bottomless dream. She blinked. Darkness fragmented into static. She blinked again, kick-starting a thought: she was Jillian D'Lange, class-one captain and owner of Zephyr. But she was not aboard her ship.

The room was small and off-white, a bare-bones compartment with a sterile glare. A holo-plaque of a comet streaking silver across a field of jet-black hung on the far wall. It was the SU emblem, and the only adornment in sight. The inscription read: Research, Our Gateway To The Unknown. So, she surmised, this was a research facility of some kind, probably a hospital. But why was she here?

She pushed herself upright on her dense-air platform. So far, so good, she thought then. At least, nothing hurt. Then she saw her hands. Instead of spacer-white, they were tawny brown—not just in patches, but all over, fronts and backs and in betweens. It was the most elaborate syntheskin graft that she’d ever seen. As she gaped at herself, thinking what the f---, she began noticing other things, too. Like: she had no fingernails anymore. And: the veins that had mapped the backs of her hands were gone, too. And her left ring finger, a crooked memento from the first and only time that she’d forgotten to use the rail while moving through a ship in flight, was vector straight now.

These weren’t her hands! But they did what she told them to do! She waggled her fingers—one by one, then altogether, translating her bewilderment into a sign language. Their responsiveness only fanned her confusion, for while she could see them moving, she couldn’t feel them. There was no pain, no weakness, no sense of power.

Stars above! What had happened to her? Her arms were the same color as her hands. So was everything else that she could see: breasts, shoulders, ribcage. She flipped back the bio-plastic coverlet that had pooled around her hips to find more bloody syntheskin. That, and big knees, and a hairless groin, and overly angular feet that only had four toes each. She clenched her teeth, and then her eyelids. A scream cycled furiously through her head.

What was going on here? And where the f--- was her navel?

As she groped in vain for the memory that would explain her condition, she heard the door to her room whisk open and then shut again. Quicker than thought, she grabbed the coverlet and pulled it all the way up to her neck. Then she leveled a rancorous scowl at the balding, white-smocked man who was striding toward her.

“Hello, Jillian,” he said, in a breezy tone. “I’m sorry no one was here when you woke up, but you weren’t expected to regain consciousness for another three weeks yet. Personally, I’m delighted. Early revivification is always a good sign.”

“Who in hell are you?” she demanded, heartened by the familiar rasp of her own voice. “Why am I here?”

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