Desdemona Skene is a breath away from losing her job. She isn’t thrilled spending her days as a glorified crossing guard for shipping traffic through the Taurine Strait, her system’s local wormhole. But, since her accident, it’s all Dez has. Her friends have moved on, her ex is seeing someone else, and she may or may not be in debt to the mob for some ill-advised wagers. At eighty-one years old, she’s not exactly a prime candidate for upward mobility.

Then, Dez learns that New World Corporation will be sending the largest civilian ship ever built by humanity right through her friendly neighborhood rift in space. Piloted by an experimental artificial intelligence, NWC is betting that this shakedown cruise through the Taurine Strait will prove how their pilot is capable of navigating a wormhole when all other attempts with AI have failed. That’ll spell not only the end of Dez’s job and that of thousands of human pilots, but probably her station as well.

If that ship’s taking her down, Dez wants to drag it along for the ride—and make a tidy profit while she’s at it. In order to stop the ship and get her money, Dez will have to gather her old crew (if they’ll still talk to her), shake the mob, and outwit both megacorps and empires. But if she pulls this off, she might just be able to live out her dream of a quiet retirement.