CAGI Entry #45

Title: STEALING THE SUN

Genre: NA Sci-Fi

Word Count: 80,000

Query:

Twenty-five-year-old Taro Takahashi has made a career out of running away. Using the quantum starships his father built he can leave whole universes behind, but the one thing he can't escape is his name. That's why Taro became the notorious pirate Trig: famous for his own reasons, or treasons as the case may be.

Now Trig's stolen the fastest ship in existence, the Rising Sun, but he still can't outrun his past. First, there's Ort—the scaly, six-armed, cannibal captain of the warship on Trig's tail—who's hungry for revenge (or maybe just for Trig). Then there's the Sun herself—an echo of Trig's late father's designs—sentient, stubborn, and not entirely convinced that she wants to be stolen.

From investigating a mysterious shipwreck in a far-flung fungal jungle to the final showdown with Ort aboard a forsaken space station, Trig's epic joyride becomes a race to save himself (and everyone else by proxy). If he wants to succeed he'll need to earn the Sun's favor. For that, he's got to stop running long enough to face his past. His biggest concern used to be escaping his father's shadow; now Trig would settle for escaping with his skin.

Firefly meets Hitchhiker's Guide in STEALING THE SUN: sci-fi action-adventure with comic undertones.

My short fiction has been published in the 2009 and 2011 editions of Understory at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where I received a BA in English Literature. My creative nonfiction “Gunshots on Dogfish” placed first in a 2011 statewide writing competition and was published in F Magazine.

First 250:

Trig couldn’t believe what he wasn’t seeing.

A shockwave sent him swaying. He kept searching for the shift control; they wouldn't destroy the ship to keep it from being stolen. Another blast, closer; Trig fell. He'd lost his footing, and his certainty. Would they?

The Yamato-Musashi was an Imperial warship full of ravenous monsters, and Trig had just stolen their cargo. He'd stowed away among the Vaxaxian crew—no small feat for the most wanted man in the multiverse—and located the hold without being able to read a word of Vaxaxian.

That's where he found the Rising Sun: sole focus and responsibility of the warship and its bloodthirsty crew. A thing of beauty, he stole it from under their noses. Snouts. Face holes? Whatever. He powered up, released the dock clamps, started the sublights, all without incident.

Of course the hardest part was finding a button.

From his new vantage on the floor Trig stared at the panel above and blinked. Nothing changed. So much for quantum relativity. He opened his eyes on the same controls, flickering slightly with each blast. He relaxed his stare, gazed through the controls at the ceiling above, sighed.

At full ahead the sublights barely broke the gravity of the massive warship. The Yamato-Musashi only needed to stall him a few minutes longer. The slowest chase in history, on the fastest ship in existence.

Before standing, he felt beneath the seat. No shifter there.

Yep, Trig thought, he was pretty well nerfed.