PIRATE JENNY
An illustrated science-fiction action adventure
The death of a child creates a wound that never heals.
Five years after her son’s murder turns her into the solar system’s most feared outlaw, Pirate Jenny takes a routine smuggling job and discovers her cargo contains alien technology with godlike power—making her the target of governments, pirates and a trillionaire who wants it back.
Jenny and her five-year-old son, Finn, lived in one of Earth’s last rural havens.
Then off-world bandits came for New Flanders’ blue poppies. Finn was killed in the crossfire. Jenny survived.
That is where her old life ends.
In the battered freighter Valkyrie, Jenny runs contraband from port to port—a long-haul trucker in space.
Quick cash. Rented intimacy. The adrenaline of the next score. The system calls her Pirate Jenny. She calls it killing time.
Half of her hopes the authorities catch her. The other half wishes somebody were good enough.
The nondescript metal case in Jenny’s hold contains alien matter that can rebuild life from the smallest trace of DNA.
Then the cargo spreads through her ship—and finds the one thing Jenny never left behind.
At first he is barely human: a creature learning breath, language and trust at impossible speed.
But the face is familiar. Jenny names him Dusty. He calls her Mom.
He is not Finn. He might be.
Dusty races from infancy to old age in a matter of weeks.
Every day brings Jenny closer to losing him. To understand what the alien matter made, she must return to the place where the wound began.
Reno’s pirate crew. Trillionaire Lothar Rand’s mercenaries. Corrupt cops. A zero-G escape, a neon casino and a pursuit through Jupiter’s moons—with a ship that may not survive the run.
She has outrun death once. Now she has somebody to live for.
A space western with a human countdown.
Lethal, funny, sexually frank and grief-armoured—Jenny travels from death-row fatalism to a ferocious second motherhood.
An alien-born child gives Jenny a second chance at motherhood—but he grows from infancy to old age in weeks.
Truck-stop ports, battered freighters, dirty casinos and blue-poppy farms define Jenny’s worn, working-class world.
A death-row extraction, zero-G escape, casino brawl, moon pursuit and blue-poppy last stand give the emotion cinematic scale.
The illustrated novella
Take the run with Pirate Jenny.
A hard-edged science-fiction adventure about grief, outlaw survival and the dangerous seduction of a second chance.
Written by Mark Rogers from a story by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, with eleven full-colour illustrations by Tomislav Tikulin.
The creators
Writer
Mark Rogers is a writer and artist based in Baja California, Mexico. His award-winning travel journalism has taken him to 56 countries; his crime novels have been published in the US and UK. His memoir, Uppercut, is published by Cowboy Jamboree Press, and NeoText publishes his Tijuana and Gray Hunter series.
Story
Academy Award-nominated for Children of Men and co-writers of Marvel’s Iron Man, their work also includes First Snow, Cowboys & Aliens and The Last Vermeer. They created and executive produced the television series The Expanse.
Illustrator
The Croatian illustrator began as a graphic designer and comic colourist before building an international career in science-fiction, fantasy and horror. His cover work includes Larry Niven’s Ringworld Engineers, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, Stephen King’s Carrie and Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.
Text © 2025 Mark Rogers. Illustrations © 2025 Tomislav Tikulin.
