StarLighter

Diary of an explorer

By: Marc Neuffer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

StarLighter: Diary of an Explorer

Dwella is an Explorer of the people — a lone wilderness scout trained from childhood to sense life from miles away, cast silent messages, and read the earth under her feet. She has walked the wild for years, guided only by her instincts, her spear, and a wolf companion named Theta. She does not believe in magic.

Then a dead Explorer's medallion disappears into her chest and begins to sing.

A mountain cave deposits her in a desert on another world entirely — a planet of starships, military bases, and a civilization that has been waiting, for thousands of years, for someone exactly like her.
They call her StarLighter Prime. The ancient legends say her kind once saved an alien race from extinction. The blood tests say she is the great-great-grandmother of the first one who bore that title. The medallion — an entity older than this universe — says she has no choice.

What follows is sixty years of Dwella's life: building a corps of mind-linked warriors from the children of her people, navigating the politics of a multi-species Conclave, raising a daughter while losing everyone she loves to a war against an enemy that cannot be reasoned with — vast fleets of mindless builder machines that do not distinguish a living world from raw material, and do not stop.

StarLighter is the diary of a woman who only ever wanted to explore the next ridge, and instead became the hinge on which a galaxy turned.

Book includes Old Friends, a bonus short story: two elderly writers in lower Manhattan. A mysterious new neighbor. And the quiet machinery of time.