Excerpt: The Black Cat of Serragos 9

It is the year 3025. Intergalactic travel has become a normal way of life. In fact, those who choose to remain planetside instead of taking to the stars to find their destinies are frowned about and ridiculed by the 'spacers', or spaceship travelers.

No one is quite sure when the first melding of spirit and spaceship took place. Some trace its origins back to a voodoo civilization on Carain, where human sacrifices were typically performed to bring good fortune upon a newly crafted vessel. Others say that it was a natural progression of artificial intelligence, that the spirits were manufactured due to lines of intricate coding rather than any sort of 'magical' powers.

Regardless, everyone knew that the best ships in the galaxy had their own personal ghost inside the shell. It served primarily as a navigation computer, steering its crew through places no human navigation would dare travel. There was something about the otherworldly nature of the spirits that made them able to see where no others could, find pathways through the most dangerous galaxies.

In truth, the deal was struck long ago with the spirit world. There was religion involved in a sense, but anyone with half a brain knew that there were three choices awaiting you after you died: you could repeat another life cycle in the hopes of raising one's karma, you could be judged as you were now, or you could become a navigator. The spirit navigator was known as a CAT, or Command Apparition Techlink.

Any spirit, regardless of their actions during life, was offered these three simple choices. However, those who had been wicked during life, whose souls were blackened with their vile deeds, had a slightly different scenario. They were given the same choices as their purer brethren, but they had only nine chances to raise their karma. If they could not change after those nine attempts, they were considered damned, and their spirit condemned to wander the empty regions of space for all eternity.

Very few people wanted a Black Cat as a navigator. There were tales told of those spirits that simply didn't care any more, crashing their ships into suns and killing their crews as well as several inhabited worlds at once. They had nine chances; why not have fun with a few of them? However, no matter how much the flaw in the contracts was pointed out, the Spirit World refused to change their minds on the matter. Spirits could serve as navigators for decades, and those ships that threw themselves into suns generally had a different story that the judges verified.

People still wanted spirit ships, and so the contracts continued unabated. A few deaths here and there were not enough to turn away the majority. There were even rumors that one of the original spirit ships still existed somewhere out there in the galaxy, though that was merely a legend...right?