Siobhan Dunmoore: Books 1-3 - Eric Thomson

Written by Eric Thomson
Format: MP3

Siobhan Dunmoore isn’t having a good war. She’s had more ships shot out from under her by the invading Shrehari Empire than any other officer in the Fleet. Some call her overly aggressive. Others simply call her reckless. What the enemy calls her is something else altogether. That she gave the Shrehari a good drubbing along the way doesn’t matter in the least, because not all her enemies wear an Imperial uniform. A reputation for bad luck is pretty much all she has left. After another near defeat, she wants nothing more than a long rest, because this time, she escaped by the thinnest of bluffs. Unfortunately, the Admiralty has other ideas.
The frigate Stingray is known as the unluckiest ship in the Fleet, one whose Captain was removed in disgrace for cowardice. Some in the Admiralty want to retire the old warhorse. After all, she is the last of her type left in service and perhaps it’s time to break up the jinx permanently, along with the crew. But during an interstellar war, every ship that could fight is needed. In short order, Dunmoore goes from staring down the Empire’s finest on the bridge of a wrecked battleship to taking on a demoralized, semi-mutinous crew, scheming admirals, and a deadly mystery. Stingray’s bad luck isn’t just superstition gone rampant. Between a crew that won’t talk, political enemies who want her gone, and her personal demons, she has her hands full. Taking the frigate into battle under those conditions would seem foolish to anyone else, but Dunmoore never shrank from a good fight. Duty, honour, loyalty. What meaning do those words still hold during an interstellar war where the difference between the enemy and one’s own leadership is sometimes paper thin? Unfairly relegated to punishment duty far from the battle lines and still pursued by her past, Siobhan Dunmoore must sail her ship deep into pirate-infested space on a quest to restore the Navy’s reputation after failing to stop an attack that destroyed a civilian freighter. There, she hopes to find clues that might absolve Stingray’s crew from blame but instead, she’s sucked into a vortex of intrigue and treachery that threatens not only all their lives, but the future of the embattled Commonwealth. Caught in a web of competing schemes for supremacy while fending off marauders, mercenaries, and spies, Dunmoore must find a way of getting her people home safe and beyond the reach of a powerful cabal at the heart of the Admiralty.
One last mission. One mysterious passenger. One baffling destination. After centuries of travel, an ancient log buoy finally reaches human-controlled space. Amid a stalemated interstellar war, the Admiralty has little interest in wasting resources on what would likely be a fruitless search for the truth, but someone convinced them to send an old, obsolete frigate soon destined for the scrapyard, on this quest. Pulled from her patrol route, Siobhan Dunmoore is ordered to take an envoy aboard Stingray and sail into a poorly charted and virtually unexplored region of the galaxy hidden behind interstellar dust clouds. Along the way, she’ll encounter an old enemy, now also relegated to the fringes of the war, turning a voyage of discovery into a race against time and against each other.