Welcome Fellow Traveler

When a stranger appears, newly-minted Chief Dith M'Barre is assigned the impossible task of discovering who he is and where he came from. She begins to unravel the mystery. The stranger is not an intruder, but neither is he one of the travelers she knows. He comes from a place within the ship that should no longer exist—a lost community living by old rules, unaware of how much has changed. As two branches of the same journey finally meet, Dith must decide whether she is investigating a mystery, welcoming a lost colleague, or changing the future of an entire ship.

Arden Jean Kayser came to fiction the way most good things arrive — sideways and unplanned. A career that slowly squeezed the creativity out led to writing as the obvious way to put it back in. The first story was Attack of the Killer Moths — short, silly, and entirely necessary. The second was E9, a workplace spoof of an MRP software system that later somehow became a colonial planet with three moons, unfamiliar fauna, and its first double murder. Arden writes across genres — crime fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic, children's — on the grounds that a good story doesn't much care what shelf it sits on. The only rule is that if it stops being fun to write, it stops getting written. Based in California. Easily distracted by fictional worlds that don't exist yet.