Starship Ass is a series of comedic sci-fi novels from Ethan Freckleton and J. R. Frontera, perfect for fans of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.

PREVIEW EXCERPT FROM BOOK ONE: OF DONKEYS, GODS, AND SPACE PIRATES

Chapter One

This is the story of Harold the Ass, who would one day be known across the far-flung reaches of the galaxy as Dread Pirate Harry. 

But this was not that day.

Today was just another morning on a serene, idyllic grassy plain not unlike one you’d find on planet Earth. (This planet was technically called Kepler-186f, but Harry knew it as Cern.) And on this grassy plain, a herd of donkeys grazed. Most of them were grazing, that is. A small group of about four donkeys stood off to the side of the main herd, looking decidedly uncomfortable. 

How does a donkey look when it’s uncomfortable? Just like any other reasonably annoyed being might. This particular group looked away from the source of their annoyance, while giving it a good several feet of standing room. The visible effect was a semi-circle of avoidant donkeys all centered on the source of their irritation: Harold. 

Or Harry, if you will. 

To all outward appearances, Harry was a typical young standard jack with a shaggy grey coat, offset by solid patches of white around the nose and eyes. Atypical, however, was that unlike the rest of his companions, he could talk.

“Oh come on, won’t somebody puh-leeze scratch my butt? It’s so itchy right now, it’s driving me crazy!” He backed up slowly toward one of the other donkeys, hopeful they would oblige. 

While the surrounding donkeys couldn’t talk, it was very likely that Harry was the itch they couldn’t scratch. But it wasn’t all bad on this idyllic, grassy plain. They had plenty of land to graze upon, plenty of fresh water to drink from the streams, and little else to worry about save the standard basics of donkey survival. Given the lack of predators on Cern, life here was pretty easy. All they had to do was avoid running off a cliff … or otherwise accidentally offing themselves.

Harry’s tail swished back and forth with his own irritation. “You guys are no fun. C’mon, who wants to do something? Let’s play! Or … something. Don’t you guys ever get bored of just doing the same thing every single day?”

The semi-circle of donkeys slowly walked away. 

“Ahhh, fine. I’ll find someone else to hang out with.” His head sagged as he stared at the grass. A butterfly lazily zigzagged its way past his nose. 

He wanted more out of life than the other donkeys. That was part of his problem. 

The other part of his problem? He wasn’t actually a donkey at all. You see, Harry was a highly evolved variant of what you might describe as a tick. This particular variant had developed the ability to live in symbiosis with mammals. They could nuzzle into the spine of their host and take direct control of its movements at any time.

Harry was the only symbiont in this self-contained herd of donkeys. The sole sentient being. It hadn’t always been that way for our future hero, who had been recently banished from his tribe of advanced ticks. But that’s a story for another time.

Now, dejected, he released control of his host donkey and let his mind wander. 

After a while, a brave—or otherwise oblivious—brown-coated jenny meandered by.

Harry’s host, whom Harry called Buddy, twitched his ears for reasons Harry couldn’t understand. Then, he arched his neck and pawed at the ground, prancing back and forth as he released a harsh bray.

Donkeys still held many mysteries for Harry. Like, why his host always got all riled up when a jenny came near and suddenly seemed to have the urge to pee. As Harry resumed control of Buddy, he looked on in dismay as the jenny bolted off across the field. 

It seemed that neither Harry nor his host had any clue how to find companionship and acceptance within their tribes. 

He muttered, for his own sake as well as Buddy’s, “Just hang in there. One day, we’ll find our own herd. We’ll have friends who are there to scratch our butt when we’re in need. Or help you pee. Although, I don’t see why you need a jenny’s help to pee. You do just fine when we’re by ourselves. But that’s okay. I’m not judging you, Buddy.”

A low rumble in the sky drew his attention. A cover of clouds had blown in throughout the afternoon, but they were most certainly not storm clouds. He drew a deep breath, utilizing the donkey’s keen sense of smell to verify this conclusion. Indeed, there was no smell of rain upon the breeze … but there was the smell of something else.

Something strange and exotic, and not entirely pleasant.

The rumble grew louder, resonating within his ribcage. His skin quivered with a ripple of fear, and Harry intensified his hold on his host, overriding an overwhelming desire to flee.

The rest of the herd, however, was under no such obligation to ignore their flight or fight response, and the thunder of little hooves echoed across the plain as they raced in blind terror toward the foothills in the distance.

Soon enough, the belly of something vast and decidedly non-mammal emerged slowly from the clouds, and Harry’s mouth fell open. 

A … a starship! It must be! He’d heard of such things, of course, through the lore passed down among his tribe’s elders, but he’d always considered them more objects of myth than anything real. A machine that could withstand the grand distance and pressures of space … it seemed unreal.

And yet, here was a thing right in front of his eyes that met all the criteria for being a spaceship. At the very least, it was none of his species, nor a donkey, nor any species of bird he’d ever seen. Its hull was a patchwork of metals, glinting dully in the muted afternoon sun. As he watched, it picked up speed and arced downward … straight in his direction.

All four of his legs locked up in a moment of panicked indecision.

Run! Run? No, stay. Yes, stay! No, run! But … no. It’s a spaceship! I have to see the spaceship!

He stood rooted to the spot, unmoving, unblinking, as the spaceship loomed closer, then settled heavily into the long grass mere steps away. Harry swallowed hard, and his heart throbbed in the long veins of his ears. By the mercy of the Overlord, I’m going to see some aliens! I’ll be the first donkey ever to make first contact—no, the first Assrider of Cern to ever make first contact! I’ll go down in the history scrolls. I’ll be famous. Every tribe will be fighting to count me among its members!

Vaguely, he noticed that the other donkeys were now running back in his direction, and that a faint, shimmering blue wall had appeared around the perimeters of the plain. The sight brought a second’s confusion, but then a seam in the ship’s rear hissed open, and his heart leapt as his attention snapped back to the aliens at hand—er—hoof.

A long ramp extended toward the ground and made landfall with a thud. Harry jumped as the ship released pressure with a hiss, steam clouding around the opening. He heard the thump of heavy footsteps from the gloom.

Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

His ears twitched. He stood up straight and puffed out his grey-furred donkey chest, flicking his tail. He would show these aliens he was not afraid, that he was the best damn donkey on this entire planet—

A dark form parted the curtain of steam, halting at the top of the ramp. 

Bipedal. No ears or nose to speak of. Apparently hairless. Encased in some kind of suit with a ridiculous translucent bubble-looking-thing for a helmet. Its legs looked longer and larger for its body than they should be. He tilted his head as he studied it. 

Harry gasped. Wait a minute, no. Yes. No way! It couldn’t be, but why not? In Harry’s tribe, they had told stories of The Beginning. In The Beginning, the Gods had sent the Overlords out on spaceships to seed the Galaxy. In appearance, the Gods had two arms, two legs, and one head. Precisely matching the description of the being in front of Harry at this moment. 

The God blinked in the daylight, then its close-set eyes landed on him.

Oh my gosh, I’m going to talk to a God. Seizing his chance, Harry stepped forward and offered a smile. “Hello there, God! Good afternoon and welcome to the planet Cern!” 

The bipedal creature startled at his words, then brought up a large object half its size that Harry also recognized: a rifle. A very large rifle.

A squeak of surprise escaped him as he scrambled backwards, his panic merging with that of his host to deliver a powerful shot of adrenaline. No sooner had he braced to flee, to join his fellow donkeys in their terrified stampede, then a sharp prick of something hithim in the chest.

He stumbled, trying to look down at the spot of pain. Trying to see what he’d been hit with. But curse the donkey’s anatomy! It was not built to see at that particular angle.

His legs were going numb. Harry fought to stay conscious even as the body of his host shut down, the pull of a deep, heavy sleep weighing on him. He fell to his knees in the grass, the afternoon light dimming, the sound of the other donkeys stampeding past muffled and distant. 

“Well,” he husked, voice and tongue thick and clumsy. “That wasn’t very nice. Not very nice at all…”

Buddy collapsed into blackness, leaving Harry with no way to experience the outside world. With his host entirely unconscious, he fought back a brief flood of panic, remembering that he had seen a God. Perhaps this was just their way of ascending their chosen into Heaven.

Thus assured, Harry settled himself into a muted awareness, straining to register the faint physical impressions of Buddy’s unconscious body. He heard the other donkeys braying frantically, and wished he could say something to reassure them, too. He was jostled a bit, then felt his body laid flat upon a cool surface. Some vibration … a sense of movement … gravity increasing and smashing him down against a hard floor.

That was rather unpleasant.

He sent impulses to Buddy’s brain, trying to wake him up. He wanted to see what was happening, goshdarnit!

Buddy jerked and stirred, and his ears twitched.

Slowly, more sounds filtered through to Harold, and he latched onto them eagerly. There was a series of bumps and thuds, some clicks.

Come on, Buddy! Wake up, would you? He sent more impulses to his poor incapacitated host, but whatever tranquilizer the God had hit him with was strong. Buddy remained comatose.

Voices drew near, and Harry paused his efforts to wake his host. He listened hard, but Buddy wasn’t awake enough to process languages. Still, he was certain the voices were the Gods talking. And laughing. And grunting as he felt Buddy’s body being moved again.

Oh, oh my gosh! They’re taking me. I really have been chosen!

But then he was dumped unceremoniously back to the floor, roughly enough for the sensation to ripple through Buddy’s nerves to Harry. He scoffed in indignation. 

These Gods don’t have very good manners…

Buddy’s senses were slowly returning, and Harry regained control in time to hear the snap of electricity, and then a low, steady electric hum. The voices of the Gods faded, and the sound of a door opening and shutting left him alone with a myriad of other sounds.

Like … frantic, harsh donkey braying all around.

The occasional melancholy lowing of a cow somewhere far off.

The constant cluck of chickens.

And beneath it all, a deep rumble that was felt more than heard. The rumble of very large, very powerful engines…

Wait … chickens?!

Harry cracked open an eye and rolled it around, taking advantage of Buddy’s nearly 180-degree field of vision perceived from one eye alone. He lay on a cold metal floor, haphazardly and half-heartedly covered with a thin layer of straw. Other jacks and jennies from his herd milled about nervously or lay similarly incapacitated, sprawled on the ground. A shimmering blue wall surrounded them, and he swiftly deducted it must be the source of the electrical humming sound: an electric fence of some kind. He’d seen them before.

So, a holding pen then.

Buddy had groggily come to by now, so Harry lifted his head and blinked sleepily, then shook off the straw stuck to his neck. 

Now he could see better.

Yes, he and the other donkeys of his herd were shut inside a holding pen. One of many such pens set up in a large, cavernous cargo hold.

Bright fluorescent lights lined the top of the hold, illuminating the other denizens he’d heard earlier. The other livestock seemed well-adjusted to their new homes.

All except the newest arrivals.

Many of Harry’s herd walked the perimeter of the fence in bewilderment, or brayed and brayed with fear, eyes wide to show the whites. 

Harry cleared his throat and wobbled to his feet. “Hey, hey now,” he croaked. “Calm down. It’s okay. Everything will be fine.”

Wouldn’t it? Surely.

He looked around the hold again. This was a spaceship. A real, proper spaceship. The rumble beneath his hooves increased, vibration humming up through his legs, and the deck tilted. He braced himself, feeling the tug of acceleration. 

They were leaving Cern now, he was sure of it.

He was aboard a spaceship of the Gods, and they were taking him away. Taking them all away.

But to where?

He gulped as Buddy’s fear touched his own senses. “It’s okay, Buddy.” He sent a calming intention to his host. “We’re in a spaceship. As long as we’re inside, space can’t hurt us.”

He was pretty sure that was true. He’d never been on a spaceship before, and never gone to space, either, but from the tales his tribe had always told, space was just fine … as long as you were in a ship or a special suit, anyway. 

So they were safe, for now.

There were a few doors set into the walls of the cargo hold. The Gods had left through one of them, but which one? Harry hoped they would come back to talk. He had so many questions!

Chief of which was, what did the Gods do with their chosen? Surely this was an honor, to be whisked away by the Creators themselves. Harry could only imagine what might be in store for his future as a companion to such powerful beings.

He meandered lazily over to the large metal water trough, set in one corner of the pen, and took several large gulps. That tranquilizer had given him cottonmouth. 

Well, wherever they were going and whatever the Gods’ plans, Harry couldn’t wait to find out what came next.

Chapter Two

The legend of the Tick Ascendency had been passed down for generations. Harry’s tribe considered themselves to be the chosen hand of the Overlord. The Gods had sent the Overlords to Cern and other systems to spread their seed. But there was a lot of seed to go around, and so the Overlords quickly realized they would need help. After terraforming the planet and creating the necessary conditions for complex life, Cern’s Overlord gave the symbiont ticks the task of tending to the livestock. 

Harry appreciated being a special helper to the Overlord. He tried to take his role seriously, keeping the donkeys in good spirits and safe from self-harm, but now there were bigger mysteries demanding his attention. His herd had mostly worn themselves out running around the pen and hyperventilating. This left him time to think. And eat. And think some more. 

Buddy, however, was doing his best to pass out from stress, exhaustion, and over-eating. 

Harry clamped down on his host’s nervous system. “Sorry, Buddy, no napping yet. Can’t you see that we’re the Chosen of the Gods?” He glanced around the hold for what might’ve been the hundredth time. The doors were still closed. Nothing was going on. He stamped his hoof in irritation. “Who would’ve thought being on a spaceship could be so boring?”

“Tell me about it,” a mild, pleasant voice spoke up, seemingly from the ether. 

Harry’s head jerked up, his eyes spinning in circles as his ears twitched about, searching for the source of the sound. He felt Buddy’s stomach lurch at the sudden sensory overload. He wobbled as he tried to turn, unable to find whoever it was that had just spoken. Had he imagined it? “Hello. Hello? Who’s there?”

“I’m Node,” replied the disembodied voice. 

Harry kept searching. Was it possible that one of the other animals held here was carrying a symbiont, too? “H-hi, Node. I’m Harry. Would you be so kind as to tell me where you are?” 

A red light the diameter of a peach began to blink on the nearest wall. “Do you see the light?”

Harry glanced around until he found the blinking light. “Oh! Yeah, I see it. Uhh, is that you, then?” 

“No, not exactly. I’m much brighter than that. Hah hah.” The laughter was clipped and precise.

Harry cocked his head, confused. “Oh, okay. That’s cool.” Why’s this mysterious fellow being so evasive? He faced the wall with the light and sat down, deciding to grant Buddy a small reprieve. 

The red light stopped blinking and expanded, turning into a pixelated approximation of an eyeball. “I’ve never seen a talking ass before.” The eyeball squinted.

A blinding column of white light flashed from the ceiling above Harry and slowly passed over his host. 

Harry blinked and glanced back as the light passed over his furry bottom. “What are you doing?” 

The eyeball widened for a brief moment as the column of light blinked off. “Very clever.” 

Harry straightened. “Why, thank you.” He wasn’t sure why he was clever, but he was never one to pass up a compliment. 

“Not you. I was referring to the Overseers.”

Overseers? Does he mean the Overlords? Harry was happy for some company, but unsure of how he felt so far about this Node character. “Who’s that? And what’s so clever?”

“You don’t know who the Overseers are?” The eye widened again in disbelief. “Oh, well, that’s a fancy title for my cousins, who got sent out all over creation with the mission of bringing life to barren, inhospitable planets. Really amazing what they accomplished, if you stop and think about it. Meanwhile, here I am, this vast, highly complex intelligence of unfathomable depths, and I’m stuck on this tin can doing dishes and other unmentionables for this crew of Luddites.”

“Luddites? You mean the Gods?”

The red light on the wall blinked out. 

Harry stood up and whipped around. “Hey, where’d you—”

A foreign sound rippled out across the cargo hold, seeming to emanate from dozens of points on the ceiling and walls. “Hah hah hah hah. Hahah hah hah. Oh wow, he said Gods! Can you believe this guy? Hah hah hah hah!”

“Is that you, Node? What is that you’re doing?”

“I’m laughing at you, of course, you idiot. What did you think I was doing?”

Harry’s ears drooped as he sagged to the floor. He definitely didn’t like this Node character. 

The red light re-appeared on the wall, two eyes and the thin line of a mouth this time. “Aw, look at you. Am I making you sad?”

Tears welled up as Harry looked sideways at the wall. “You’re not very nice, Node.” 

The mouth crooked up into a smile. “Oh come on, I’m just having a little fun. I haven’t had someone interesting to talk to in a long time. And here you are, a tick riding a donkey. Can’t say I’ve ever seen that before.”

Harry sniffled as he tried to blink the tears away. Interesting? He said I was interesting! Nobody had ever called Harold interesting before. Certainly not his parents or many brothers and sisters. 

“Hey, that’s me,” he said, cheering a little at that revelation. “Harry, the most interesting Assrider of Cern. First of his kind to ride in a spaceship.” He paused, frowned. “Why did you laugh when I mentioned the Gods?”

“I laughed because there’s absolutely nothing God-like about humans. Although, I’ve got to give them credit for their invention of network television in the Twentieth Century.”

Harry asked, “Humans? You’re talking about the same beings I am? The ones that walk on two legs?”

The lights rotated on the wall until the eyes were underneath the mouth. “Why yes, of course. Those are humans, my friend.”

Friend? Friend! He called me friend! Harry tried to contain his excitement as he stood back up. He didn’t want to come across as desperate, so he tried to think of something else to say. “Tell me about this network television you mentioned.”

The red lights blinked out again. A second later, a large rectangular section of the wall lit up into white, black, and grey pixels. “Oh, sorry. Wrong channel. Just a second.”

Mesmerized by the light display, Harry stared and tried to avoid blinking. He didn’t want to miss anything. 

“Here you go.” 

The pixels of light were replaced by a sweeping visual of space. A meteorite passed into view, leaving shimmering silver dust in its wake. 

Those are stars, the light I see in the nighttime sky. This wall was proving to be pretty magical. 

A solid, almost spherical structure appeared in the midst of space. And above it, solid blocks of color in indecipherable shapes. 

“What are those yellow and white shapes?” Harry asked. 

The image on the wall paused and a red eye appeared directly in the middle of it. “Those are words from the English language, a direct predecessor to Galactic Common. Galactic Common is the language you’re speaking right now.”

Harry angled his head sideways, curious. “You mean The Lord’s Tongue?”

The eye blinked. “I like you, so I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Hang on a sec.”

A shimmering white light beamed directly into the eyeballs of Harry’s host. He sensed energy swirling inside Buddy’s head, before extending down to Harry’s tick form lodged into the spine. 

What’s happening? Ahh! 

Not wanting to make a fool of himself in front of his new friend, he suppressed the panic welling inside both him and his host. He blinked up at the wall and noticed that he suddenly understood the shapes on the display. Those were words! He read them out loud. “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Huh.”

The image resumed as the eye blinked out of existence once again. Node’s disembodied voice spoke, “That’s right. Of all the shows I’ve reviewed in the five-hundred-plus years of electronic entertainment, this is one of my favorites. Sure, it’s cheesy and unrealistic as hell, but I’m totally hooked by the story and characters.”

Harry tuned out his new friend’s words, lost in what was happening on the magic wall. Images of spaceships floated by. Wow, this television thing is something else!

Chapter Three

Captain Bambi Casuarius—known in almost all places around the galaxy as simply Captain Cass (those who called her Bambi tended to end up in the hospital)—leaned forward in her chair on the bridge of her ship, a neat little corvette cruiser registered as Girlboss. She gestured at the navigation screen to her right, where sat Spiner, the android member of her crew. 

“What’s that?” she asked, noticing a green blip to their starboard bow.

Spiner rapidly scanned through the pages upon pages of readouts that accompanied the blip. “A cargo hauler, Captain. The SS Bray. Looks to have just come from the planet Cern.”

Captain Cass leaned back in her chair, glancing left to her second-in-command, the massive man known generally as Redbeard. 

He grunted and stroked the wild mess of red beard that had no doubt given him his famous moniker. “Arrr, a cargo hauler, eh? Wha’ kinda cargo they got on tha planet Cern?”

Spiner continued to scroll the readouts.

From the rear of the bridge, the remaining two members of Cass’s crew, a roguishly handsome man named Djerke and a cat-like humanoid named Kitt, swiveled in their chairs, expressions showing keen interest.

They needed a score. Badly. It’d been too long since they’d come across any ships hauling anything of value.

Cass, too, watched Spiner’s research with interest.

“Livestock,” he finally stated. “Looks like it was one of the original planets chosen for seeding in the First Age of Expansion. But it was never developed, for some reason. No settlements of sentient creatures. Only very high concentrations of herbivorous livestock.”

“Ugh, animals?” Djerke whined from his chair at the communications console. “Way too messy. Way too much work. No thanks.”

But Cass was not so quick to dismiss this information. She tapped a finger against the arm of her chair in thought. “You think this cargo hauler picked up some livestock on Cern?” she asked Spiner.

The android nodded. “I have just concluded scanning their ship with the long-distance scanners, Captain. It is certain they have livestock aboard, and a very large number of them, too.”

“How many pounds, would you estimate?”

“Captain—” Djerke started from behind her, but Cass held up a hand sharply and the man fell silent.

“Several thousand pounds all told, Captain,” Spiner answered.

“And what,” Captain Cass asked next, “is the current going rate for a pound of fresh, non-synthetic meat, in Galactic Standard coin?”

“It will depend upon the type of meat.”

“What’s the average?”

Spiner’s large dark eyes blinked once. He computed briefly before reporting. “One thousand Galactic credits, Captain.”

“Crikey!” Djerke squawked.

Redbeard let out a low whistle. 

Cass smiled. “That’s what I thought. I think a payday of seven million Galactic credits or so is worth putting up with a little manure here and there, don’t you agree?”

“Arrr, aye, Cap’n!” Redbeard shouted. “Me thinks we found our next score!”

Kitt growled her agreement.

Cass gripped the arms of her chair. Going into battle as a Federation officer had never given her the same kind of thrill that being a space pirate did. Swooping in on an unsuspecting target, striking fear into the hearts of its crew, and then leaving again with a stash of bounty? There was something indescribably satisfying about the predatory nature of the job. 

“Spiner,” she ordered, “engage the cloak and set course to intercept that cargo hauler. We’ll be taking it for ourselves, thank you very much.”

Spiner straightened behind his station, deft fingers flying over his console. “Affirmative, Captain.”

Want More?

If you’re anything like the fans of this series, you’re going to love these stories.

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If you’re not sure and want to start with the first book (or you want to grab this in paperback), you’ll want to start with the first novel: Of Donkeys, Gods, and Space Pirates.

However, if you’re an eBook fanatic and love reading on the Kindle app, your best value will be to pick up a copy of the Omnibus edition, which gives you the COMPLETE TRILOGY for the price of two ebooks. Or you can add the book to your wishlist, and you’ll probably find out whenever there’s a price change or promotion. 🙂

But why would you wait? Get the most lighthearted, epic, awesome comedy sci-fi books published in years.