The Stars Down Under

Chief Terry Myell and Lieutenant Commander Jodenny Scott are in that most precarious of military situations, a mixed marriage. Enlisted and officer. It’s unnatural.
 
Terry and Jodenny have been assigned to duty on the planet Fortune, away from the huge ships that carry colonists from the wreckage of polluted Earth to clean new worlds across the galaxy.
 
But there’s another way besides spaceships to travel from world to world. A group within Team Space is exploring the Wondjina Spheres, a set of ancient alien artifacts that link places and times. Now those spheres have shut down and Team Space thinks that Terry and Jodenny are part of the key to make them work again —no matter how the two of them feel about it. They can volunteer, or be “volunteered.”
 
What the researchers can’t anticipate is that the status quo, in which Team Space holds the monopoly on travel between worlds, is about to change. And as a result, Terry and Jodenny will be tested to their limits and beyond….

“Likeable characters, excellent development, and a series of interlocking puzzles worked out against Australian culture that most Americans will find exotic. A smart, fun, read.” —David Drake on The Outback Stars
 
“The author shows intimate knowledge of the nuts and bolts of what really makes big ships tick…and the careful attention to the elements of Aboriginal culture makes this even more worthy of a reader’s time.” —Walter Hunt
 
“Strikingly realistic. The Outback Stars gives the genre of military SF a very hard shake indeed. Buy this book; I guarantee your sense of wonder will get a workout.” —James Patrick Kelly
 
“Sandra McDonald knows the Navy, what makes a ship run well and what can make it run badly. Lieutenant Jodenny Scott is the sort of tough, smart, but thoroughly human officer we’d all like alongside us in an emergency.” —John G. Hemry, Author of Against All Enemies and (as Jack Campbell) The Lost Fleet Dauntless, on The Outback Stars

Sandra McDonald has been a Hollywood production assistant, a software instructor, a bureaucrat, and an officer in the United States Navy. Her short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her previous novel was The Outback Stars. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.