Skipdrive

In the darkness at the edge of space, something is lurking.

Scarred, careful Eliza would rather dig around in the guts of a half-wrecked Russian viper than talk to her ex. But when her ship, the USS Melissa, gets called upon to race out past Pluto she might not have any choice. They need her ex's ship and its experimental skipdrive to beat their competitors to the prize: the first alien lifeforms, hovering cold and inert in the deep black.

It's a race against time to capture the aliens before other ships beat them there or blow them out of the sky. But the new skipdrive has unexpected side-effects and the aliens are not as quiet as they seem.

Skipdrive is approximately 15,000 words--a novella.