The Mess Boy and the Starship

About this book:

Seventeen-year-old Jack Mercer knows his place on Platform Four: bottom of the ladder, knee-deep in grease, feeding men who drill holes in the Gulf floor for six dollars a day. He knows the rhythm of the rig—the shudder of diesels, the taste of brackish water, the way salt air eats through steel. But Platform Four doesn't follow the rules. Its legs don't rust. Its deck doesn't vibrate. And deep in the dark water, something hums against the hull like a heartbeat the size of a mountain.

The men in pressed blue shirts on the forbidden third deck call it "special alloys." The toolpusher calls it company business. Jack calls it the coldest thing he's ever touched in ninety-five-degree heat. When the supply boat fails to arrive and the drill bites into something that isn't rock, the mess boy with the forged papers and the tobacco-tin savings realizes the rig isn't anchored in the Gulf mud at all. It's waiting.

From the galley of a 1954 oil platform to the edge of the asteroid belt, *The Mess Boy and the Starship* is a genre-bending odyssey that hides a starship in plain sight—built not in a clean room, but welded together by roughnecks who didn't know they were building a ladder to the stars. Jack Mercer is about to trade his ladle for the helm, because the only way off this rig is up.