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This book picks up shortly after Trading in Danger (which I read and enjoyed last year). Newly minted space captain Kylara Vatta survived a civil war and even a mutiny by dangerous people temporarily housed on her ship, and acquitted herself well enough that the mercenary company in the area offered her a job, but she decided to stay with the family business of trading, for now. Shortly after the book opens, there are multiple, coordinated, devastating attacks on Vatta ships and on their main offices and palatial home on the planet Slotter Key. Ky and her ship manage to escape unscathed, but because the ansible communications are down she doesn't know exactly what's happened, she decides to proceed with taking her cargo to Lastway as planned. Soon, she's embroiled in a much bigger war to try to save what's left of her family, find out who was responsible and why, and see if she can somehow start rebuilding the family empire.

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Kylara Vatta is about to graduate from Spaceforce Academy on Slotter Key at the top of her class when a scandal erupts that she unwittingly, innocently played a role in - and, to save face, they kick her out. Her family has a vast shipping empire, and to get her away from media attention and give her something to do, they make her a captain and send her on a "milk run" with an experienced crew to babysit her-- she's taking the Glennys Jones to Lastway. At the first stop she comes across a possible money-making venture and decides to risk it, hoping to make enough money to buy the old ship she's captaining for herself and repair it, rather than scrap it for salvage as she is supposed to do. Naturally, something goes wrong-- and Ky's military training ends up being very important.

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In a near-future world, this book tells the story of an autistic man named Lou. Lou seems like a very high-functioning autistic person: he lives by himself, he drives a car to work, where he works with a team of autistic people who do some kind of abstract, pattern analysis or pattern generation that seems pretty technologically advanced and profitable to their company, and he even goes to a weekly fencing group. Early in the book, Lou is thinking to himself (during his required quarterly psychiatric evaluation, where he is careful not to say to much or say the "wrong thing") that "the speed of dark is as interesting as the speed of light, and maybe it is faster and who will find out?" This is a recurring question, which is pretty interesting in itself-- because of Lou's notion that dark must be at least as fast as light, since it is moving ahead of the light to get out of the way; but it also comes to have a larger significance in the book: certainly the darkness hints at ignorance and the unknown, but there is also Lou's discovery that the questions he asks aren't necessarily invalid even though he is "different" and has been told this all of his life.

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