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...