Trading in Danger By Elizabeth Moon

Trading in Danger

By Elizabeth Moon

Elizabeth Moon was born in Texas, on March 7th, 1945. She grew up only a few miles away from the Mexican border, giving her experiences with another culture. This gave her an appreciation for how the culture you grew up in and the ones you were exposed to early can shape your view of life. This followed her to Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she took a few courses in Cultural Anthropology and graduated with a BA in history in 1968. She served three years in the Marine Corps as a computer specialist with the rank of First Lt. She married her husband Richard while they were both in the service in 1969. After leaving the Marines, she attended the University of Texas in Austin and graduated with a second BA in biology (Huh). She also did some graduate work in biology at the University of Texas. Her son Micheal was born in 1983. While she started dabbling in writing science fiction in her teens, she considered it a sideline for the most part. She didn’t begin seriously writing until her 30s, starting with a newspaper column in the county paper and selling short stories to Analog magazine and having one printed in the Sword and Sorceress collections. Her first novel, Sheepfarmer's Daughter was printed in 1988. She has since written roughly 28 novels and over 50 short stories, winning the Nebula award for her science fiction work Speed of Dark and being a Hugo finalist in 1997. Today we're going to be looking at a military science fiction work of hers, called Trading in Danger, which was first printed in 2004 is the first book in the Vatta's War series. Let's take a look.

Trading in Dangers starts on the worst day of Kylara Vatta's life, or at least the worst day of her life so far (Oh no. That does not bode well.). When she woke up that morning, she was a Cadet at the top of her class in her home system of Slotter Key's naval academy. She was engaged to the only other Cadet who was even close to her performance and was confident of having a productive and honorable career in Slotter Key's Space Navy. By the time lunch rolls around, she has been forced to resign in disgrace, due to helping a cadet who had claimed he was in trouble but was actually looking to make some trouble (Oh that just sucks.). She breaks off the engagement with her fiance and has to go home in disgrace. Of course, this could be worse because Kylara is the daughter of one of the major trading clans of her home system (Damn. Well, at least she had her golden parachute to fall back on I guess. Yes, I can feel pity while at the same time despising capitalism.). Vatta Transport is one of the great shipping firms of her neck of the galaxy, owning dozens of faster than light ships and her father is the Chief Financial Officer of the company and her Uncle is the CEO. So it's not like she has to worry about what she'll do for a living, just if she can bear working for the family company (I’m sure she’ll manage. But at least she has actual worthwhile training as opposed to other corporate spawn promoted well past their level of incompetence. {Considering they make Vatta family members go on trade trips as apprentices at the age of 13, I imagine they spend a lot making sure family members have the right training and skills, space is unforgiving after all} Excellent! Also this is all very age-of-sail.). To keep her from suffering further political attacks and to keep the press away from her, her father arranges to make her Captain of Easy Shipping. One of the Vatta's ships is reaching the end of its operational life span, so it's one last multi-system cargo run and then a trip to the breakers. Of course, someone has to Captain the damn thing, so it might as well be Kylara. Not seeing any other options and being eager to get away from relatives even more eager to say I told you so, or worse sympathetic ones (Okay, yeah that would be completely insufferable.). She isn't fast enough to avoid being burdened with three nearly inedible fruit cakes made by her aunt Gracie but everyone has their burdens to bear.

If this were an easy cargo run to the breakers, we wouldn't have a story, would we? Never mind a military science fiction story. While still feeling the sting of being made a political sacrifice, Kylara decides the best thing to do is move forward, and to her, that means trying to find some side jobs to make the cargo run more profitable. Maybe even enough to refit her old tub of a ship into something modern enough to keep. So when she finds out that one of the planets she's stopping at is having trouble because a shipment of farming equipment disappeared, she figures she's got step one mapped all out. Just make a quick trip out system to pick up some farm equipment, sell it for profit and see what she can do from there. Of course, she ends up flying right into a developing warzone and because Ms. Moon delights in her character's suffering, the ship's FTL engine fails just as they come in the system and it's very expensive to fix (Oh wow. Yeah, Ms. Moon really does like making her characters suffer. Damn.). Kylara could just call home for some cash but someone blows up the ansibles and things really start to get out of control. Now in this universe, ansibles are the devices that enable faster than light communication. Ansibles as a distinct term (meant to be a contraction of answerable) first showed up in 1966 in a novel by Ursula Le Guin. In Ms. Moon's book, they're run by a fairly ruthless corporate monopoly InterStellar Communications (Kill them in book two...). They maintain their monopoly in many ways, such as keeping strictly neutral in local disputes, not openly censoring or messing with data passed through using their network and hunting down and brutally killing anyone who screws with their network (So, it’s a natural monopoly by way of network effects rather than actually anti-competitive practices? Or do they do chicanery to keep anyone else from setting up their own network? {Worse, they monopolize the tech and come after anyone researching it} But… how? That is one hell of a sweet legal arrangement they have there. {They have a fleet and are not afraid to use it}). In fact, it's been decades since anyone was insane enough to even think about trying until Kylara got a ringside seat to someone blowing one up.

Kylara is in a star system she can't leave, she can't call out, and is surrounded by armed mercenaries and unknown enemies. It's not even a system she's ever been in before, so she doesn't even have a home-field advantage to work with here. Everyone else has more weapons (Is she even armed? {She has a crossbow!} So her ship is not even armed. Christ. Wait a crossbow? Really? {Yep!}), more resources, and the advantage of initiative on her. All she has is her training, her wits and an aging crew of civilian specialists who thought they were on one last milk run. At least her goal is simple, stay alive, keep the crew alive and keep control of the ship. The question is can she achieve even that much? This means that the title of the worst day in the life of Kylara Vatta is now an open question, right alongside the title of the last day of Kylara Vatta's life.

Ms. Moon does a great job of making this feel like a real, living universe despite not delving too deeply into the history or politics of the setting. What you can quickly grasp is that humanity has settled the stars and lives in a large number of single systems, or even single planet nations. You can also pick up that interstellar trade is common and Ms. Moon makes it clear by showing us institutions and customs that have grown up around interstellar trade. Such as Captain's guilds, places where ship Captains can go while in port for a place to stay and to make it easier for them to find cargo and passengers. The fact that Kylara's home system of Slotter Key has consulates on every planet and Kylara routinely visits them for information and support as well as having to do favors for various consuls and representatives to keep the wheels of trade greased. Kylara has to hire security while visiting foreign planets and there are listings of companies that she can refer to complete with notes on just how dependable and safe each company is. There are inter-system commercial laws and regulations that everyone agrees to follow and the mercenaries have their own lawyers, even. All of this reinforces the idea of a large trade network binding these planets together on multiple levels and I enjoyed the little details that make it work. Another element that I found interesting and that Ms. Moon explores without letting it overwhelm the plot are the implants. The implants are cybernetic computers that are usually implanted into the skull, they serve much like modern-day cell phones and personal computers. The characters use them to access most of their technology and store their information. Ms. Moon doesn't infodump any of this but lets you find out by witnessing the implants in action. We also find out that some in-universe religions don't allow for people to have implants and they're considered deeply disadvantaged in some respects but that's not a major plot point in this book.

Character-wise, this book is primarily about Kylara Vatta, with most of the other characters only impacting the story in how they relate to her. While her family does make an appearance in the first couple chapters of the book, it’s the ship crew that plays supporting cast. Mostly the two elders of the crew, Gary and Quincy who are the cargo master and chief engineer respectively. Both of them play the role of elder adviser and for me at least the rest of the crew didn’t really create an impression. That said, Kylara is capable of carrying the book. She's a young woman who is going through a lot of stress (Clearly.) and keeps finding herself in worse and worse situations. Often just by simply doing what she thought her duty was. It makes her rather easy to sympathize with as we've all been in situations where we did exactly what a decent person was supposed to do and have it completely blow up in our faces (Many times.). While coming from a privileged background as the daughter of a major trading family, she's still an outsider in that her military training splits apart from the civilians around her and the fact that everyone keeps misreading her intentions and plans. At the same time, Kylara also has to question herself because if she's doing everything right, why does everything keep getting worse. Which at least makes her more self-aware than a lot of people I know. Kylara is very much not trying to be a hero in this book just keep her crew safe and get out of this situation alive. As a military science fiction book, this might seem questionable but let's be honest the soldiers and marines aren't the only people in a war zone. In fact, they're often the minority of people in a war zone (By orders of magnitude sometimes. I mean, look at the movie Enemy at the Gates. It’s about the siege of Stalingrad and we see all of two civilians. In reality, there were 400 thousand of them, and by the end, only between 10 and 60 thousand remained alive within the city. Imagine a story about some poor schmuck factory worker trying to survive that.) and Ms. Moon uses this story to focus on other types of people who might find themselves in a war and trying to get out alive. This makes the stakes somewhat smaller than your average military science fiction but it also makes them more immediate. Kylara isn't fighting for honor or her nation's survival, she's working to make sure she makes it through the day. She doesn't care what everyone is fighting over or for because it has nothing to do with her but she might end up catching a stray bullet over it anyway.

Now the book isn't perfect, while it tells a complete story in and of itself, it's a story that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. For example, there's a lot about the antagonists that is left unanswered by the end of the story. This is a small problem because we left with little understanding of the motives, or desires of the antagonists other than there’s a shadowy group of people who are using the cover of a war to blow up vital infrastructure for unknown reasons. Part of the reason it’s not gone into is that Kylara is too busy staying alive to try and solve mysteries but I found myself with a lot of unanswered questions about what exactly happened by the end of the book. Part of that is because Trading in Danger is the first book of the series, another part is because there's no realistic way for Kylara to find out. While we do get a few chapters from her father's point of view, most of the book is told from Kylara's and Ms. Moon plays her cards close to her chest. Some plot twists could have also been foreshadowed or pulled off a bit better because some character revelations are a bit out of nowhere. Ms. Moon uses that to great effect so I have to think it was a purposeful decision on her part. That said this fun read and a good one and I would recommend the entire series to anyone interested in a military science fiction that avoids a lot of the time tested presentations and ideas. Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon gets a B+ from me.

This book was the second in our series on military science fiction written by women.  A theme that was we arrived in response to votes by our patrons.  If you would like to vote for upcoming books to review, discuss the reviews or vote on theme months like this, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can vote for as little as a 1$ a month.  Next week we continue Women of Military Science Fiction (WMSF) month with The Myriad by R.M. Meluch. Until then, Keep Reading! 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders