Like the priests who sailed the Atlantic in the 1700s, Father Guerin is making a long and dangerous voyage to an assignment in a strange new world. Only in Fr. Guerin’s case, it’s literally a new world.
The year is 2462, and he and three others are passengers on the cargo ship Hopeful, bound for the recently colonized planet Xanadu. They and the six member crew will travel in long thin strands of warped space called slipstreams, cut off from the rest of humanity by the vast distances of interstellar space. What sort of person is willing to say goodbye to friends and family and spend half a year with less than a dozen people?
There’s Hannah, a fellow passenger, who says that she wants to start a horse ranch but the only thing she’s clear about is not wanting to be on earth. There’s Katie, the ship’s engineer, who doesn’t like anyone and seems to especially hate priests. And then there’s Freia, the assistant engineer, whose perpetual viking cheerfulness may be a mask for something deeper. What will they make of the well-educated and possibly over-confident priest who has an answer for everything?
And when space pirates attack and drive them out of the slipstream, will they die in deep space, or will they find their way back to the stitch in space which is their only hope?
