The worst ship in the fleet. The last captain anyone wanted. One dying colony, forty days from running out of air.
Eddie Bohannon used to be a legend.
Once, he could hear the old star-roads sing. He ran impossible threads, saved lives, broke records, and made the kind of name people toasted in frontier bars. Then came the Magpie. Twenty-six dead. One inquiry. Five years grounded at the bottom of the galaxy, drinking in the dark and trying not to hear the roads anymore. Then Harbor goes quiet.
The colony’s thread-routes are souring one by one, ships are shearing apart in the dark, and forty thousand people have less than forty days of scrubber-stock left. The official maps say there’s no way through. Unfortunately for everyone’s paperwork, Eddie Bohannon has never been much for official maps.
Reinstated in desperation and handed the Sundog, a patched-up old Survey cutter with a cranky ship-mind, a flat-note engine, a lemon tree with rank, and a crew of inconvenient geniuses nobody else wanted, Eddie has one job: find a new road to Harbor before a corporate rescue fleet arrives with a contract, a smile, and plans to own every breath the colony takes.
But the dying threads aren’t failing. They’re being closed.
Something ancient is sealing the roads between stars, something older than humanity, older than the maps, and very much not interested in being owned. To save Harbor, Eddie and the crew of the Sundog will have to go off the map, outrun the company, wake a machine the size of a moon, and ask a ten-thousand-year-old door to open one last time.
Politely. Mostly.
The roads between the stars belong to everyone. Somebody has to keep the doors open.
Amazon
The roads between the stars belong to everyone — and someone has to keep the doors open.
Out on the ragged edge of the frontier, the old star-roads are starting to fail.
The Lattice has carried ships between worlds for thousands of years, a network of ancient made roads left behind by the vanished Loomwrights. No one knows how the roads were built. No one knows why the makers disappeared. And no one knows what waits beyond the sealed dark at the edge of the map.
Eddie Bohannon knows only one thing for certain: when a door between stars starts closing, the people at the far end still deserve a way home.
Once a legendary thread-runner, now a half-broken captain with a gift that may be killing him, Eddie is handed the Sundog, the worst ship in the fleet, and a crew of brilliant misfits nobody else wanted. There’s Ada Cullen, the rule-loving cartographer who trusts maps more than miracles; Pip Dillinger, a young pilot with too much nerve and not enough caution; Birdie Achterberg, an engineer who treats the ship like a beloved antique with terrible manners; Quill, a Threnn science officer whose faith may hold the key to the vanished makers; Dr. Marin, who keeps everyone alive through sheer will and sharp objects; and Bosun, the ship’s deadpan AI, who is absolutely logging every objection.
Together, they chase dying threads, lost colonies, impossible machines, giant questions, terrible corporate smiles, and the moving dark the Loomwrights sealed away ten thousand years ago.
But Saltline is racing them for the same answers, and Saltline doesn’t want open roads. It wants ownership.
As the Sundog’s voyages carry the crew from one endangered world to the next, the mystery widens from a single dying colony to the fate of the entire Lattice. What did the Loomwrights become? Why did they seal themselves away? And can one battered ship keep the galaxy connected without letting fear, greed, or one very well-dressed mega-company close the doors forever?
Full of frontier adventure, strange worlds, cranky ship systems, impossible moral choices, cosmic wonder, found family, and the kind of captain who taps the wishing valve three times before doing something spectacularly inadvisable, Voyages of the Sundog is old-school science fiction with a warm, reckless heart.
The map says the road is closed.
The Sundog says: log your objections and hold on.
Before the Sundog, before the legend, Eddie Bohannon was just a cocky young thread-runner with a bad habit of hearing things no one else could.
Twenty-four-year-old Eddie Bohannon expected his first Survey posting to be dull enough to kill him by paperwork. Map the old star-roads. Log the knots. Try not to fall asleep while the ship’s prim navigation mind insults his professionalism.
Then a distress call comes from Sixpenny Light. A child is dying on the far edge of the Greel chain, and the only way to reach her in time is through the Cinch, a broken, half-mad thread that has already swallowed eleven ships and earned one very clear warning in every manual: Do not run.
But Eddie can hear the Cinch. Not the way instruments hear it. Not numbers, not graphs, not tidy little Survey-approved predictions. He hears the hitch in the old road. The stutter. The breath between disasters. And if he’s right, he can save a child. If he’s wrong, the Kingfisher becomes number twelve.
Packed with frontier grit, impossible star-roads, cranky ship intelligence, heroic nonsense, and the kind of captain-in-the-making who taps brass for luck and calls it science, The Cinch Run is the origin story of Eddie Bohannon and the day the universe first learned his name.
The roads between the stars belong to everyone. Somebody has to keep the doors open.
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