Five Space Opera tales, short stories and novellas with a foreward written by Peter Grant. Tamashira has a dilemma. Stay with the ship and crew she knows, or risk being stranded on an unknown planet forever when the warp node goes out of resonance. Really, it's not a hard decision to make. But then a girl is kidnapped and she must face her past or have a death on her conscience. Lira is a space scout. Like the mountain men of old Earth, she explores and blazes trails. But her duty has taken her to a very settled planet, to retrieve a young woman, and it's no milk run. Lissa looks to the stars, excited to leap off the Earth and into her destiny. But first, there is someone she has to see one more time. A lonely young woman on a faraway planet tends her family and wishes she had someone to talk to, other than family. High above in a courier ship, a ship's officer is about to learn how content she really is, even if she doesn't feel that way... Susan is not afraid of bugs. But when she makes a second contact with aliens, that lack of xenophobia might not be enough to keep her alive. The cat is, she learns, sometimes smarter than the human. From the foreword by Peter Grant: "There is occasionally - all too rarely - a moment that comes when reading something new, a sort of mental frisson, when one realizes that one's reading something special. This isn't just another run-of-the-mill book or story, but something that is reaching out of the page and grabbing one by the throat and dragging one into its world and storyline, absorbing, entertaining, sometimes even enthralling. That's what happened to me the first time I read Cedar Sanderson's work. It was her novel, "Vulcan's Kittens", and I've never looked back from there. She's one of the few authors whose work I'll buy sight unseen, knowing that it'll intrigue and challenge me and make me think."