Captain Lana Fiveworlds has a hell of a lot of problems.

She's sliding void in an ageing seven-hundred-year-old space ship, scrabbling around the edges of civilised space trying to find a cargo lucrative enough to pay her bills without proving so risky that it'll kill her. She's got an alien religious freak for a navigator, an untrustworthy android for a first mate, a disgraced lizard for a trade negotiator, and a deserter from the fleet acting as her chief engineer.

And that was well before an ex-crewman turns up wanting Lana to rescue a barbarian prince from a long-failed colony world.

Unfortunately for Lana, the problems she doesn't know about are even more dangerous. In fact, they just might be enough to destroy Lana's rickety but much-loved vessel, the Gravity Rose, and jettison her and her crew into the void without a spacesuit.

But there's one thing you can never tell an independent space trader. That's the odds...