Long Gambit

Long Gambit is the second novel in Ken Lizzi's Twilight Galaxy, following the crew of the free trader Long Gambit through a galaxy in slow decline, where shipyards no longer build interstellar hulls and trade routes wither one world at a time.

Captain Pyater Welloons is broke. His ship sits clamped to the pad for unpaid moorage fees and his accounts are nearly empty, so when a rush job appears - twelve million doses of medicine for the plague-stricken world of Owming - he takes it, even though the terms leave him barely enough to fly. Worse, he has to source the drug himself on Ixtpa, a planet where the population lives under permanent chemical haze and the factories run themselves. The one compound he needs has been bought up to the last ampule to treat a livestock plague on another world.

So Welloons plans a heist. What follows is a lean, fast space adventure: a break-in through an automated underground, a street fight with desperate addicts, a brush with suffocation when a part nobody replaced finally corrodes, and an ambush by two pirate ships that somehow knew exactly where the Long Gambit would be. The crew's salvation turns out to be a piece of bargain-bin electronics the captain ordered thrown out, and the man least likely to save them is the one who finally does.

When the ship reaches Owming, Welloons learns the hardest lesson of the run: delivering the medicine and getting it to the people who are dying for it are two different jobs - and the government that ordered it may be the last thing standing in the way.

For readers of working-ship, declining-civilization space adventure in the line of C.J. Cherryh's merchanter novels, Andre Norton's Solar Queen, Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper, and the dry, frontier-trader tradition of H. Beam Piper. Character-driven, wry, and built for series readers. The story is the point.

Book Two of The Twilight Galaxy Series. A complete story: the adventure begins in Dekason and concludes in Brazos.