Alexis Carew

Denholm Carew enjoys a life most would envy. Scion of a wealthy family on New London, he can have almost anything he wants. But what he wants more than anything is the freedom to make his own way and build his own legacy to pass down to his children. Together with his wife, Lynelle, he sells everything to buy shares in a colonial company and settle the newly discovered world of Dalthus IV.

At 15, Alexis Carew has to face an age old problem - she's a girl, and only a boy can inherit the family's vast holdings. Her options are few. She must marry and watch a stranger run the lands, or become a penniless tenant and see the lands she so dearly loves sold off. Yet there may be another option, one that involves becoming a midshipman on a shorthanded spaceship with no other females.

Just as Midshipman Alexis Carew thinks she's found a place in the Royal Navy, she's transferred aboard H.M.S. Hermione. Her captain is a Tartar, liberal with the cat, who thinks girls have no place aboard ship. The other midshipmen in the berth are no better and the only advice she's offered is to keep her head down and mouth shut - things Alexis is rarely able to do.

Newly commissioned lieutenant Alexis Carew is appointed into HMS Shrewsbury, a 74-gun ship of the line in New London's space navy. She expects Shrewsbury will be sent into action in the war against Hanover, but instead she finds that she and her new ship are pivotal in a Foreign Office plot to bring the star systems of the French Republic into the war and end the threat of Hanover forever.

For Lieutenant Alexis Carew, it should be the perfect assignment - a command of her own and a chance to return to her home star system. What she finds is a surly crew, the dregs of every frigate and ship of the line to pass through on the way to the war's front, a first officer who thinks the command should have been his, and colonial worlds where they believe a girl's place is somewhere very different than command of a Queen's starship.

A cease-fire in the war with Hanover leaves Lieutenant Alexis Carew on half-pay, in-atmosphere, and with her ship laid up in ordinary until called upon once more for the needs of the Service. It would be a tranquil, peaceful life, if not for the influx of asteroid miners seeking their fortunes, the uncertainties of her inheritance, and the nagging certainty that her current life is not what she really wants. She’d give anything to command a ship again.

Trapped on a hostile world, hunted by pirate bands, and abandoned by her fellow captains, Alexis Carew must lead her small band to safety, even though it seems every hand is set against her. Stalked by pirates in the skies above and shadowy alien figures on the planet below, Alexis must convince former enemies to trust her even as she discovers where the tendrils of her true enemies lead.