Lee Anne Wonnacott Weltsch

Tarragon Lee Anne Wonnacott Weltsch

Space is dark and deep and has a bull-eye painted on Jake Lattrell's forehead. The Yellow Knife Intermodal Freight Company vessel, Sky Horse, exploded when the wrong asteroids kissed in the cargo hold. It caused a chain reaction onboard the freighter and tore the ship apart. Fresh off a catastrophic ship disaster, depressed, and teetering on the edge of a financial crisis, Lattrell was on the verge of diving to the bottom of a bourbon bottle. A trouble-magnet since birth, life was an ongoing clawing and scratching to make a living as an inter-planetary cargo hauler. Yellow Knife was profitable on Earth but had failed to capitalize on the wealth of system cargo hauling. Now, the self-doubt and debilitating fears have turned Jake Lattrell into someone he doesn't like. Lady luck took a swing at him and put the captain in the right place at the poker table at Earth Space Dock. Lattrell had nothing left to lose when he sat down to few hands of cards. A once-in-a-lifetime royal flush won him title to the Roharh-built ship, Tarragon, one of the most technologically advanced ships out there. That bull's eye just got bigger. Twenty years of hauling cargo from Earth to outside the solar system rim with his Earth-based partner based in Alaska, USA, Yellow Knife Intermodal Freight Company was modestly profitable. Lattrell's crew calculated that one good run with Tarragon off the rim could put the company in the black and keep it there. If they could learn the ship systems. The maiden voyage from Earth's Space Dock out to the Silver Array takes Jake and his motley crew into the path of hidden stealth ships, crippled space stations, and broken-down private yachts. But that is not the worst of it: The Tarragon alien artificial intelligence thinks and has its own agenda and Lattrell has started to wonder who owns who. Yellow Knife Intermodal Freight Company has a secondary business of various ship mechanical repairs. Each port, each encounter becomes a mental test upon Lattrell to shed the survivor's guilt and struggle to get through it. This adventure story of space cargo freighters and savvy ship mechanics captures the independent human spirit and confirms the power of bonded friendship and shared mutual trust.