Ten Hearts: an adventure with love & light speed

Being a mercenary is hard. Being human is hard. Being both is a crap-screw. And it can get you killed. Zai Yakozy commands a Merchant Navy crew, providing muscle for powerful corporations. After their last job went bad she has to take on new weapons team, and Zai isn’t certain she’s ready. It turns out the new crew is pretty good, but she’s not happy when the weapons team leader turns out to be…distracting.
Denver Arc Aro has made a decent life for himself. In a universe where most humans are migrant labor of one sort or another, the Merchant Navy gives him enough food and a comfortable bunk, which he hasn’t always had. He’s good at his job and mostly wants to be left alone. But Zai Yakozy makes him wonder if life might not offer a little more.
Zai and Denver’s ship, the Mossback, goes out on what should be a simple salvage and recovery mission. When they and the rest of the Merchant Navy team arrive at the isolated space station, they find most of the inhabitants dead or hiding. Worse, the station’s Sekoni administrators are dead, and dead Sekoni usually mean trouble for living humans.
The MNav force is stretched too thin, trying to manage hostile and traumatized station residents and find the equipment they were originally sent to locate. Zai has to keep her crew alive long enough to get them paid. Denver has come back to the ghosts of his past, because the station is where he was born and then lost everything he had.
Denver and Zai have each other’s backs, but it may not be enough to get them out alive.