Sabrina Chase
***Rights Available***
Genre: Science Fiction

In the far reaches of human-occupied space, the Fleet carrier Canaveral is engaged in battle with an enigmatic alien enemy.  Moire Cameron serves as a mercenary fighter pilot.  Quiet and unassuming, she achieves sudden fame when she manages to destroy a massive enemy ship; the first one destroyed by humans.  But Moire shuns the attention, especially when Fleet officers begin to ask questions...

An officer on the CANAVERAL, Colonel Ennis, begins to suspect something is very strange with their ace mercenary fighter pilot, but can’t quite guess what.  Only when Moire takes advantage of a budding mercenary mutiny to escape the ship, does Ennis begin to put the pieces together.  Moire had become a mercenary to avoid the clutches of Toren, a space colony corporation that desperately wants information she has.  Eighty years ago, Moire was the pilot for a NASA exploration team that had suffered a catastrophic accident on its return, causing the death of the rest of the crew and a massive gap in time for her.  Toren rescued her ship and now considers her its “property.”  When Toren sends an investigator to find out what happened to Moire aboard the CANAVERAL, Ennis finds his sympathies shifting in Moire’s favor as he discovers the truth behind her past and the Toren operative’s ruthless activities.  Toren will do anything to recapture Moire—including the murder of Fleet officers.

Suspected to have been killed in her mutinous escape and again basking in anonymity, Moire finds work as a webspace pilot on a cargo ship.  But when a stowaway is discovered who bears a startling resemblance to her, but has a childlike mind in an adult body, crewmembers believe she is involved and she and the stowaway, Alan, are left on the planet Bone by the irate ship captain.

When Ennis discovers Moire has been seen alive after the mutiny, Fleet Intelligence, now suspicious of Toren’s motives, gives him the task of finding her.  He is determined to do this, but conflicted by his anger at the mutiny, and the strange sympathy he feels for Moire.

Moire and Alan leave Bone on the tramp freighter AYESHA.  Attacked and damaged by pirates, the crew find themselves in a Sargasso Sea of dead ships.  Salvaging the necessary parts to fix the drive, Moire makes a desperate effort to fly the ship out and barely succeeds.

A run-in with a Toren manager and local law enforcement leads Moire to a frightening truth:  Alan is in fact her son, created by Toren as an artificially bred worker, just one of hundreds in existence.  And Moire’s secret and the reason Toren wants her is finally revealed:  Moire’s NASA crew had done the impossible; it discovered the route to a perfect, human-habitable world, Sequoyah.  But before Moire can act to save Alan and protect her secret, Ennis tracks her down and accidentally shoots her.  Horrified, he patches her up, and tries to convince her to return to Fleet.  Wanting to believe him but knowing Toren would then be able to capture her, Moire must escape again.

Together with Alan and a rag-tag group from the tramp freighter, Moire returns to Sequoyah, determined to defend the planet against Toren and rescue the other Toren-created children.

SEQUOYAH is the first in a planned trilogy.