Pirates + a frontier system + a rookie captain? Good times. Sydney Chambers is the Navy's brightest star until a superior's folly brings a court martial down on her career. Though found innocent, she's still tainted ... and though her Admiralty mentor salvages a captaincy for her, it comes with banishment to the farthest frontier system in the Confederacy. There she must face down two powerful bands of pirates armed only with a Navy ship recently salvaged from the scrap heap ... and only the vaguest idea of who her enemies are, or who her friends might be.