Trading in Danger — Elizabeth Moon

Trading in Danger
Elizabeth Moon
506 pages
published in 2003

Reading Sheepfarmer’s Daughter gave me a taste for more Elizabeth Moon. Trading in Danger, the first book in the Vatta’s War series was what the local library had available. It’s science fiction rather than fantasy, but it’ll do. It’s still the same sort of adventure story even if the genre has changed. The other thing they have in common is familiarity, both are coming of age stories with few surprises, but sometimes familiarity is just what you want in a story.

Ky Vatta is a cadet at the naval Academy, an unusual career choice for a child of one of the great trading families. She’s an examplary cadet, but this doesn’t save her when an impulse to help a fellow cadet lands her in the shit. Expelled from the academy, she now has to face her family. Worse, because it’s a highly politicised mess she found herself in, she also has to leave Slotter Key, her home planet. Worst of all, the reputation she has in her family as a sucker for anybody with a sob story is once again confirmed, in the worst possible way. The solution to all her problems lies in an old Vatta family tradition, that sends any child wanting to join the family trade on a shakedown cruise first. She will captain the Glennys Jones, an old trading ship on its last voyage which will be sold as salvage at the end of it, as it’s too expensive to bring up to modern standards. This trading trip will take a couple of months and at the end of it Ky will be able to come home, having proven herself as a captain. As importantly, it will also get her away from her own humiliation.

Things don’t turn out to be quite that simple of course. At the first leg of her journey she runs into a trading opportunity that might just get her the money to save the ship, giving her a chance to prove herself to her family. When she explains this plan to her crew however it turns out that this is what everybody more or less expected her to do; apparantly it’s something most firstrun captains do…

So profiting from a rival firm’s failure to deliver agricultural equipment, she takes the Glennys Jones to Sabine, to buy the equipment again on spec, getting paid on delivery. It’s a bit risky, but the profit will be worth it. But when the FTL drive craps out completely when they reach Sabine and the machines they need to buy are much more expensive than Ky thought they would be, things cannot get any worse, or can they?

Course they can and Ky and the Glennys Jones find themselves in the middle of a warzone, with no way to get out of it. What’s more, the FTL communication station in the Sabine system is blown up by one of the parties in the conflict and nobody outside the system will know what happens inside. And then the ship is hailed by mercenaries, they board to inspect it and things go horribly wrong as Ky is almost killed when one young ship’s mate pulls a gun at the mercenaries.

Ky is cut from much of the same cloth as Paks in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter: young, somewhat naive, largely unaware of her own abilities, but with an iron will and potential that’s only fully realised under pressure. Like Paks, Ky’s shipmates see her worth much more clearly than she herself does; an old trick to make your main character not too concieted. She has her flaws though, a certain blind spot late in the book leaving her and her crew vulnerable to a betrayal I could see coming from a mile away. Again like Paks, Ky is also a bit more honourable than you’d expect most people to be.

As a novel, Trading in Danger feels a bit flabby. Elizabeth Moon takes her time getting the main plot going, taking well over fifty pages just to get Ky into space. The pacing in general is leisurely. There are a lot of side issues and little subplots not of direct relevance to the main plot that help up the page count; The minutia of trading life take up a large part of this. Moon also spends some time once the main enemy is defeated setting Ky up for the sequels, as well as having her deal with the aftermath of her adventure to see that her problems have not quite all disappeared. All this can be irritating to some readers. Myself I did not mind it this time, though it did annoy me sometimes. Moon has a knack for keeping me interested in the mundane, day to day details of her heroines’ lives even if they’re not directly contributing to the plot.

Trading in Danger is good, light entertainment, slightly better than it needed to be. Sometimes that’s just what you want.