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The Ship’s Log of the Dark Moon’s Dreaded Luck in the Earther Year 5239, the month of Marching, 23rd day of the month.

I have not ever wrote a ship’s log entry before, but now that Dad is marooned on a faraway star, and both Mom and my older brother Wose are dead, there ain’t nobody else to do it.

I became captain of the Dreaded Luck about a week ago when a Lupin pirate killed Wose, but got disintegrated at the same time that the bullet entered Wose’s big, stupid head. I thought then that I would be the last living being on the starship. And I am only twelve until my birthday in Joon. Fortunately, though, I found the little Lupin puppy-girl that the pirate Lupin werewolf had brought with him. She’s cute and cuddly, not at all like an evil Stardog. I renamed her Friday and adopted her for company. And she told me a bunch of stuff about her pirate pack on the nearby planet. I needed that spy-stuff information to solve my problem of not having any crew.

The ship’s computer, David, was not independently intelligent, so I got help from an AI program called Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter. He helped me train one of the giant spiders in our cargo hold. And he turned out to be a very wise and capable friend. He read and memorized the ship’s owner’s manual. So, he could help me repair the starship and anything that broke down or was running poorly. That took care of the need for an engineer to replace old Wose. He could also teach me how to use the pirate skiff and drive it to the planet so we could secretly steal a pilot from the Stardogs’ prison.

The Crocodile guy went along with me to the planet in his holographic form, transferred from my spaceship to the skiff by data transfer. Friday went along mainly to hold onto me and not be left alone on the ship with only giant spiders and cleaning bots for company. And while we were there, we found and freed a group of Nebulon prisoners. If you’ve never met one, since I don’t know for sure who you are who will read this log, Nebulons are those blue-skinned alien people with bright yellow hair and red cheeks. We Earther-types call them Space Smurfs for some long-forgotten reason. And I didn’t know before we met them how different they really were from us, though also how much alike they are.

Suki, an adult Nebulon lady who was my size but much older than me, not only helped us all escape from the Stardog pirates but promised to use her pilot skills as part of my crew in gratitude for freeing her people. I like Suki a lot. She is also now not only a crewmember but my very good friend.

Suki’s piloting skills and my gunnery skills combined to help us win a space battle against the Stardog pirates. We apparently killed the leader of the pirates in battle, but he also used a virus to kill David, our shipboard computer. Fortunately, the Crocodile Hunter could take over David’s functions and was even better at it than David had been. We left the planet of the pirates with a six-day-long jump through folded space.

But we came out of jump space next to a monstrously huge space whale.

“Oh, my God!” I swore as I was floored by the size of the moon-scaled massive creature.

“Don’t worry, Cissy,” Suki said to me. “I am Nebulonin Clan Vorannac. That space whale is one of our clan.”

And then the super-sized creature moved to swallow the Dreaded Luck whole.

*** This novella is the second book in the Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels series of stories. This is the introductory preface of that story.***