The Celestial Sea (The Combined Service Book 3)(Theogony Books/CKP)
by Jo Boone
The Magnetar, a military space-going vessel of The Combined Service, is in for repairs after nearly being burned up in an intentional failed reentry to protect an octopod colony on an avian world (see book 2 for more details). The humans, gray alien gu’ul, avians and octopods that make up her crew are tired of being stuck in the shipyard above Elaninae and long to be on their way. Charlie Cooke, especially, just wants to get out of there with her friends and shipmates. The planet below them had not been kind to her.
They have new crew members–from the abandoned octopod colony and from the surface of avian Elaninae. And one young human, Jawaharlal Darad, who helped find a clue to what some octopod terrorists were doing, encoded in DNA. Jawaharlal is too young to be a crew member, or even enlist, but he ran away from home on Sol Gateway. And while The Magnetar will eventually return him, they have more pressing matters on their minds…like decoding that DNA before the octopod terrorists–and what look like a race of powerful external helpers–cause more cataclysms like they used to destroy Charlie’s homeworld.
So their next stop is a gu’ul world, the home of Charlie’s best gu’ulfriend Breccia, the home of the woman waiting for Captain Chalk, but–more importantly–the home of the best code breakers in the galaxy.
They find the elusive (and eccentric!) code breakers, and Charlie finds a new family and even love (for those who’ve read the first two books, it’s not who you think!) Unfortunately they also run into really lethal space pirates, and smack-dab into a gravitational anomaly that is sort of a Bermuda Triangle in space. And ghosts. Lots of ghosts and ghost ships. Are they going mad?
This novel is third in a series: good on its on but oh-so-much-better if you’ve read the other two books first. And if you read them you’ll be hooked. COMING OUT MAY 3, 2024.
