And We Sailed the Mighty Dark

Jim Sanders lost everything at the Callisto City tables, walking away with nothing but a dead man's ship and a one-way ticket to the edge of the solar system. Now he and his companion Pete drift through a graveyard of abandoned spacecraft, ancient hulks stretching for miles in the red sunset, searching for a vessel that might carry them home. What they find is something far stranger: a creature called a mirage pup, a being of living memory that conjures illusions from the depths of its grief. It remembers a girl who died on this ship decades ago, and its longing is so acute that it manifests her as a vision, a ghost more real than the stars outside the porthole. What begins as a desperate gamble becomes a meditation on what we carry with us into the void. The dark remembers what we try to forget, and sometimes the only way forward is through the past. This is space adventure with a poet's soul, a story about the weight of memory and the stubborn persistence of hope.