Cargo Trouble

Frankie Styles has a ship, a route, and a plan: haul grain to the outer worlds, speak to no one, and be forgotten.

She is very good at two of those.

The ship came with a snake. Little Minnie is pale, enormous, moody, and, Frankie is informed, too late to argue, hers now. Then comes Morgan Cloud: beautiful, broke, claustrophobic, and smuggling two racehorses he cannot afford to move. Then a stowaway cat with disreputable fur and an unblinking stare, who is not, whatever else she may be, a cat.

Frankie did not ask for any of them. She has been extremely careful not to ask for anything.

Because Frankie Styles is a name people know. She was a Child Orphan of Wala, one of the ones they paraded across the Cooperative to collect pity, one of the ones who lived. She has spent years learning how to be nobody. Out here on the ragged edge of Co-op space, it was almost working.

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