Merchanter's Luck

The Company Wars #2

by C.J. Cherryh

The fateful meeting between the owner of a tramp star-freighter that flies the Union planets under false papers and fake names and a proud but junior member of a powerful starship-owning family leads to a record-breaking race to Downbelow Station--and a terrifying showdown at a deadly destination off the cosmic charts.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Space, Fantasy

208 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. She is the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.

Reviews

[Sarah Stegall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Think of Han Solo and the Millenium Falcon. Think of Malcolm Reynolds and Serenity. Now make them lonely and reckless and hopeless. Sandor Kreja is pretty much these guys, without the supportive crew/sidekick. All he's got left after the raid that killed his family is his ship, a battered version of the Falcon or Serenity. In the opening chapter, Sandor walks into a bar and falls in love at first sight with the raven-haired Allison Reilly, a Merchanter daughter on leave. A quick roll in the hay only throws fuel on his fire, and he vows to see her at her next port, which is (for his little ship) impossibly far away. For reasons he can't or won't examine, he actually follows through with this, and arrives after staying awake on drugs and nerve through three jumps, to find that he has made himself the center of a lot of unwelcome attention.

The rest of the novel is about the lingering echoes of Sandor's family catastrophe, about how something resembling post-traumatic stress disorder can screw with a man's head the rest of his life, and about how hard it is to look past all of these things to find love and trust. It's a book about desperate love. In a few of Cherryh's trademark clipped, condensed paragraphs in the first pages, she paints a picture of a young man on the edge of life, scarred by a horrific tragedy in his youth, eking out a living in the shadow of the big players of Downbelow Station. That novel made a big splash in the early 80s, and I read it, but this story is the one that stuck in my mind for thirty years. I come back to it over and over because of the tone Cherryh puts into it, because of the way she expertly balances the yearning in Sandor against his fear of betrayal, his pride, his survivor's guilt, the secrets and ghosts (metaphorical) that are all he has left. Sandor is a victim who doesn't realize he's a victim, so he behaves like a hero and then is surprised when people say nice things about him.

Cherryh's typically compact and evocative prose supports a story which is perhaps too long on Merchanter/Alliance/Union politics and too short on the romance that fuels the story. Even though I was familiar with the referents, I didn't care. They were only window dressing for the real story, the love story. Cherryh set up a good one and didn't quite pull it off; the romance is lower-key than it needs to be to hold up a whole novel. While the ending felt rushed, it still managed to leave me with a feeling that matters had been resolved -- patched together, leaking, limping -- but resolved. It's a very human, realistic ending, not the neat, happily-ever-after ending of the conventional romance.

The taut, allusory prose, the simple and straightforward story structure, and the outstanding delineation of a very sympathetic main character make this a standout book, one of Cherryh's best. In the grand tradition of space opera, it swept me off my feet and kept me enthralled over three decades.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series has its ups and downs and Merchanter's Luck is one of the better installments. This is set shortly after the peace accords that ended Downbelow Station, ending the war between the Earth Company and the Union and creating the new Merchant's Alliance centered on Pell station. Our main protagonist is Sandor, the captain of a tramp freighter, who lost his family to pirates (read Company Fleet) years ago. He managed to survive with a few other relatives and now pilots Lucy solo, trying to make a living.

The story starts on Viking Station, part of the Union, when Sandor encounters Allison at a bar there; Allison is from the merchant ship Dublin Again, a large freighter with a crew over a 1000 strong. Sandor is full of scams and just trying to get by on the margins, but falls in a way for Allison and ends up following her ship to the next station, Pell. As mentioned above, Pell is now independent and is now swarmed by merchants, from both Union and Earth, as trade ties are beginning to be rewoven...

Besides the plot, this story is really about family. All the merchant ships are run by large, extended families and have been for generations. They constitute a unique society, alongside the folks of the stations, and have no real affinity toward Earth or the Union. Cherryh is at her best here, exploring Sandor's angst and worries in some detail; this seems to be a trope with her fiction and it works here much better than Cyteen. When Allison and a small group of 'Dublin' folks decide to jump ship and aid Sandor, essentially casting him a lifeline and new future, you know there will be some issues to settle...

Good stuff from Cherryh here-- gritty world-building and believable characters that really flesh out a fairly grim future. 3.5 rounding up!

[Jacqueline J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yup, still my favorite book. Umpty umpteenth reread. 08/13/2020

Who knows why one book strikes a chord with someone, but this one is my all time favorite and having a degree in English Lit, I read a lot. I have three copies of this book because if I look for it and can't find it within a day or two I panic and buy another copy. I love many books over many genres but my heart loves this one best.

You will enjoy this story more if you have read Downbelow Station at the very least. I will admit that the first time I read it, the end was a bit fuzzy but the more often I read it the clearer the situation becomes. The more you read in Ms. Cherryh's Union/Alliance universe the easier this book is to understand.

It's a space ship story built around family merchant ships travelling between star systems and it is certainly enjoyable from that aspect. What makes the story for me is the character of the protagonist, Sandor Kreja. He is the very last of his family, running a haunted (not literally) ship all alone. When he meets Allison Reilly from a large powerful ship, he begins to dream of having a family again. He is a total underdog but the Reillys find out that when push comes to shove, he has a core of steel and all the right answers.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review on fourth(?) reread, Jan 2017:

Amazingly taut and condensed novel -- at 208 pages (mmpb), it's almost in long-novella territory, but fully developed. Opens as a sort-of romance, evolves into a complex rescue/business deal between a distressed sole proprietor and a wealthy Merchanter family, then morphs into a twist-ending with a dramatic hunt for Mazianni pirates in the Hinder Stars. Very cool book, one of Cherryh's very best. May be her masterwork?

I haven't had a lot of luck rereading later Cherryh, but this might inspire me to reread another early Cherryh or two. Chanur series, maybe The Kif Strike Back?

[Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.0 Stars
This was a really entertaining space opera that had a good balance of character development and an engaging plot progression. 

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book rocked cover to cover. Ever met that girl at a party and were like damnit I just took a plane away, but fuck it I’m goin back to see her! Well, we get that and lots more in this complex, breathless story which certainly served as inspiration to The Expanse team with that one dude that tried to rimshot through the ring but turned into pudding. What a ride! When Cherryh wants to turn up the heat, watch out!

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it doesn’t reach the highest heights of the other Cherryh books I’ve read, this is still a wonderfully rich portrait of a traumatized captain doing his best to survive, and of the crew he finds himself working with. I remain deeply impressed by Cherryh’s ability to immerse me fully in the world she’s created, and I always believe everything her characters do and say. She allows them to live and breathe and earn their moments, and again she never lets her reader get one inch ahead of where she’s taking the story.

I have tremendous respect for the serious ideas and themes with which she infuses her stories, and I’m so happy there are many more books of hers to read.

[Cheesecake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, an audio version!
Time to revisit an old fave!

WOW!
I forgot what a gripping tale this is!

It starts slow, introducing the characters. You get POVs from both Sandor and Allison. This is important because the paranoia exascerbated by secrets and wildly different upbringings could easily make the reader prejudiced against a character or two or three...

It's a story about rich and poor, war and politics, and the everyday injustice of life... BUT most of all it's tale of LUCK.

I cried. I so wanted to hug Sandor. He's a man of unbelievable strength that's been ground down to it's bitter stub, when he meets a siren and takes a chance. And it was like grabbing the tail of a roller coaster and just holding tight for your life.

Safety is fine. It's not really a romance but there are romantic elements.

OK, now for the not so good. The audio version was just OK. I liked the voice actors, but the background noise was kinda annoying. Especially the 'easy listening' guitar that was too loud for background music. And then there's the door swish noises taken right from Startrek, and footfalls that sounded like storm troopers... meh.

.............................
first review:

This isn't really a romance, but it has those elements. I read this back in Highschool and have loved CJ Cherryh's work ever since. It's a short read (at least I remember it being a slim battered paperback), but nail biting and sweet at the same time. Politics, intrigue, quality science fiction and space pirates! One of my all time favourites. Sure wish they'd release an audio version!

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complete and total delight.

Superb. Confident and spare and elegant and sharp. Electric and alive!

The rhythm of Cherryh's prose is fabulous, compelling, exciting and tons of fun. If you have read Downbelow Station, you must read this. You will feel at home in the near future of that work.

******* Marvellous!

For Cherryh, the Alliance-Union universe books are (mostly) fantastic -
* In order to read:

Downbelow Station (1981) - Superb!!
Merchanter's Luck (1982) - Perhaps her best ever!
Rimrunners (1989) – Very good!
Heavy Time (1991) - good, but long winded
Hellburner (1992) - good, but long winded
Tripoint (1994) - very good
Finity's End (1997) – Superb
Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983) - good but uneven, important for Cyteen and Regenesis
Cyteen (1988) – Superb
Regenesis (2009) - Superb

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sandor Kreja is a survivor. He managed to escape the massacre of his family and has run the family spaceship, first with his brother, then without, for a very long time. The ship’s control system speaks in his brother’s voice, a comforting reminder of the loving connections he used to have. He has lived at the edge of the law and at the margins of society for his entire adult life and is longing to just have a chance to achieve a normal life.

Contrast this with Allison Reilly, who comes from an enormous family who run the ship Dublin Again. Allison knows that her family always has her back—the downside of this is that everyone knows each other’s business and feels no compunctions about expressing opinions about it. Add to that the limited number of meaningful positions available to the young merchanters on the ship—just like Generation Xers who follow the Baby Boom generation, they are ready to move on to bigger and better things, but the previous generation isn’t going anywhere.

Opposites attract, they say. It’s inevitable that when these two meet, there are fireworks. A casual hook-up becomes much more when Sandor recklessly follows Dublin Again to their next port of call, despite his lack of legal paperwork. Although not a traditional romance, there is a thread of their relationship running through the work, drawing the reader along to see if it will all work out. Can the lonely captain accept people back into his life again? Can the crew members of Dublin Again exorcise the ghosts of Sandor’s family from his ship? Can people from such divergent backgrounds trust each other?

I was struck by the hungry loneliness of the young man, alone in space on a ship built for a family. As part of a university project, my sister once attended a substance abuse support group. I remember how appalled she was when she realized that each of these people had absolutely no loving connection in the world. Their families had either given up on them or were part of their problems. Their only friends were other addicts. They had no one to encourage them, help them, or give them any kind of boost. It’s amazing, really, that any of them ever manage to escape those circumstances, and yet some do. I felt like Sandor was up against the same kinds of obstacles—no family, no friends, no trust, no papers, yet he was clawing his way towards respectability.

I’ve never known real loneliness, for which I am thankful. I hope that books like this one are as close as I ever get.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

We have a hard world, we do. We have a world that necessitates a certain amount of emotional distance. There are a lot of us in this world, each of us rubbing against the others. Scraping shoulders, butting souls. We need to develop a sort of emotional chitin in order to function; we can't go around the planet with all our hurts hanging out. We've all been poked in a place we can't stand to be touched. We've all been mocked for things we can't stand to display. We hide it, all that hurt and pride and attachment; we stick it in tins somewhere in the meat of us, and for the most part we can keep on without all that festering unease interfering with our work, leisure and relationships.

And then a book like this happens, and it pokes you right in the soul.

This isn't an easy book. It takes place smack in the middle of Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe, and her narrative style freely bandies about terms which will be unfamiliar to people who haven't read her older fiction, names and places whose only description is contextual. What makes it hard isn't the science, isn't the narrative, but the sheer emotional investment. It's a hard read because it hurts, because the boiling mistrust and bottled pain and unrecognized pride are things both uncomfortably familiar and easily recognizable.

The story focuses primarily on the hard-luck merchanter Sandor Kreja and his lonely long-haul space trucker, Lucy. Due to his lowly position in the interstellar economy, he has been scraping by on bare legalities, unnoticed fraud and excessive, self-destructive effort - until by a stroke of luck, an act of reckless and stupid courage, and the interference of one Allison Reilly, an ambitious and capable woman whose dreams exceed her circumstances - he manages to pull off a deal which could single-handedly save his business and himself from the lurking debt that tracks his every step. And y'now, that could be a story in and of itself. Stress, stakes, and a beautiful woman - I've known pulp that aimed lower.

But the true meat of the story, the real conflict here isn't Sandor and Allison vs. The Universe, it's interpersonal, inside. It's how this broken man kept animate by ghosts and scars reacts when finally given the chance to relax, provided he submits his trust and his ship. The conflict isn't about external violence - hell, when people start shooting at our heroes, it comes almost as a relief - but about interpersonal pain, the invisible chains of past trauma, the incalculable weight of pride, the grinding agony of personal change.

I love this author, but I went into this story not expecting much; I got it in an omnibus with 40,000 in Gehenna, which had piqued my interest more intently. I put it down and just... stared, for a time. Wondering why I wanted to cry, and how long it would take before that decades-built shell around my soul would start growing back.

Trust. It's well worth it.

[Dirk Grobbelaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second novel in the the Company Wars series, which again forms a part of Cherryh's Alliance-Union Universe.

Not sure if it is fair to compare Merchanter's Luck to Downbelow Station though. The author seems to have taken a very different tack here. For one thing, this book is less than half the page count of its predecessor, which already gives an indication of what to expect; it is quicker paced and deals with a much smaller story. Where Downbelow Station deals with events that impact the big picture, this is almost a side note. That's not to say it's a bad thing though, in fact it's quite good, to be honest.

I am not going to go too deep into this review, other than to say that Cherryh writes beautifully.
Merchanter's Luck is no exception.

An easy 4 stars.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the best C.J. Cherryh books I’ve read so far.

Set in the her sprawling Alliance-Union universe, shortly after the events of Downbelow station (probably her most famous book)
This is a much smaller, character focused story.

I’ve read a bunch of Cherry’s books and while I enjoyed them all I’d say they focused on plot and world building, resulting in in a lack of character development.

This book changes it up.
Sandor, a merchanter who lost his whole family to space pirates at a young age.
As a result he’s been operating his ship alone most of his life.
He barely scrapes by and has deep trust issues as a result of his traumatic childhood experience.

Things change when he meets Allison Riley, a vivacious and beautiful crew member from the huge and powerful cargo ship Dublin.

This was a love story but rather than the instant romantic love trope, it begins with fascination and lust, followed by paranoia and doubt.
The two main characters are well developed and things get tense as Sandor, being unable to trust Allison and her crew, draws their suspicions.

There’s not a ton of action but the tension never lets up either because Sandor is always on the edge of losing his ship, getting brain wiped, or because he’s also constantly on the edge of screwing things up with Allison who is out of his league and was probably slumming it when she decided to gift him with some pity sex.

Hold on with both hands Sandor, all you need is the compressed, filtered air in the tanks that you breathe and to love her.
Also heat in the crew compartment, .75 g so your muscles don’t atrophy, a forged cargo manifest……and to love her.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

EVERY SCI FI FAN PLEASE READ THIS BOOK, I AM NOW OBSESSED.

After playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, I had an insatiable craving for space noir feat. seedy smugglers/mercenaries in space, along the lines of Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Killjoys, Dark Matter, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc -- it's so completely rife in cinema that I was astonished to realise that it's much less common in print SF. I went digging around for recommendations, and came across people mentioning C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter series from her Alliance-Union universe, along with Jo Walton's glowing recommendation. I was instantly sold, and picked up Merchanter's Luck because it was described as a haunted (though not literally) space ship & lonely ghost story in space with a strong female character.

And gosh, but I got exactly what I wanted & had been craving. I'm bemused that Cherryh's been described as a hard sci-fi writer, because I didn't get that vibe at all: there's well-thought-out worldbuilding and technology, true, but it's all heavily character-driven and anchored in the people, their internal lives, their hopes and dreams and losses. I found myself utterly amazed that a SF novel from 1982 didn't have pulpy camp, scantily-clad damsels in distress, or dense clinical prose. The characters have depth instead: Sandor Kreja is a damaged, desperate, frightened and vulnerable man; and Allison Reilly is coolly competent and ambitious, and even gets to rail against her family's sexism at one point.

And Cherryh's writing style is delightfully labyrinthine, clauses built upon clauses in a sort of meandering lovely description that really gets you into their heads & emotions. Let's see if I can give a non-spoilery example of her prose... All of Sandor's family is dead, but his cousin/surrogate-older-brother Ross programmed his voice into the computer to help guide Sandor even after he was gone -- which leads to Sandor living (unhealthily) amongst the ruins of his old life, with the voices of the dead:

He slept in Ross's old bunk, in this one, because it was as close as he could come to what he had left of family, and this one bed seemed warmer than the rest, not so unhappily haunted as the rest. Ross had always been closer than his own mind to him, and because he had not cast out Ross's body with his own hands, it was less sometimes like Ross was dead than that he had gone invisible after the mishap at Wyatt's, and still existed aboard, in the programs comp held — so, so meticulously Ross had recorded all that he knew, programmed every operation, left instructions for every eventuality. The recorded alarms spoke in Ross's tones; the time signals did; and the instruction. It was company, of sorts. It filled the silences.

He tried not to talk to the voice more than need be, seldom spoke at all while he was on the ship, because he reckoned that the day he started talking back and forth with comp, he was in deep trouble.

Ugh, I love it so much. It takes a long time before you finally hear the details of how Sandor wound up where he is, and what happened to the rest of the Krejas -- and partially due to the delay which gives you time to get attached to this main character, it's so heartbreaking once you reach it. It's not played for shock value or fridging; it's a slow unfurling of getting to learn his backstory.

This is one of the few times that I dared to suppress my completionist urges and dive in with book #2 of a series; partially because the rec above (and Cherryh herself) has stressed how 99% of her novels can be read out of order, since they feature new sets of characters, separate stories that all just happen to occur within the same universe. The first couple pages were a little overwhelming with a flurry of names/references/terms, but then you settle in nicely and can pick things up as you go. The only real difference it made was a nagging "I think these people are important' feeling when meeting certain really intriguing minor characters who had hints of their own storylines running beneath the surface -- Signy Mallory and Tom Edger, par example -- but for once, rather than being frustrated that I didn't know what their deal was, that just made me more excited to eventually encounter them in other books.

The merchanter sub-series seems to be my utter jam, because I love these details of ordinary people eking out a living between the lines, in the shadow of a larger war. I love the detail of matrilineal spaceship crews, and all the details and logistics of how these behemoths operate -- and how the marginers, the small-fry, scrabble along in their wake. The atmosphere of this book is also reminiscent of Alien and the original Star Wars, in which the technology is rundown, gritty, and lived-in; this genuinely feels like a real universe, with real people.

This book is all about family, found family, and wary, cautious people learning to trust again. I wanted to shake everyone sometimes and wail "IF ONLY YOU'D CONFIDE IN EACH OTHER!!!", but I completely understand their healthy paranoia. The characters make sensible choices, and instead of being Too Stupid To Live, I actually found myself really commending Allison's precautions, her safeguards to protect herself when dealing with an unknown male stranger.

I got so verklempt about Sandor's family -- his arrested development and the deep, abiding loneliness of space. His desperation living on the margins, where pirates are a real, terrifying threat looming over the narrative. He's constantly a hair's-edge away from disaster, debts and the law nipping at his heels, where one wrong move can spell his doom. He's not a smooth criminal or Han Solo type; rather a lonely orphan who learned to talk his way out of trouble, but who cannot survive on his own any longer.

Allison shares the other half of the POV chapters; the story is admittedly less about her arc, but I really like her risks and calculations, her attempts to rise up the ladder and earn a captaincy of her own. I love what she brings to it because, in their romance, she holds all the cards & power & consent, which was a refreshing change of pace. Sandor and Allison's paths cross and then where it goes is tense and unexpected; I actually wasn't able to predict what each next turn in the book would be. I admittedly love their dynamic so much, but romance isn't the priority of this narrative either: it's about post-traumatic stress disorder, found family, and little people caught in the machinations of a big machine.

Highly recommended and I'm going on a quest to find more Cherryh to read!

(The only downer is that rest of the Merchanter sub-series after this -- Rimrunners, Tripoint, Finity's End -- do not have ebooks, and my library doesn't seem certain if they have copies, so I've put in a hopeful hold for them to check their archives. Because again: I am obsessed.)

(2017 review reposted, because it inexplicably vanished from my profile/history.)

[Gabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up, cause a) it's not the book's fault that space opera is not my fav subgenre, and b) my mind tends to go into stand-by mode with all the technical and space politics explanations, so I'm sure I missed some details.

What I liked about this book was the restriction to two POVs so it was a lot easier to get into it than I was used with others of Cherryh's works. One of them, the lonely starship captain, was very well fleshed out with his traumatic past and his relatable struggle between mistrust and wanting to belong.
The scenes between him and his new crew were the highlights for me.

The other characters more or less stayed two-dimensional. Same with the 'romance'. I didn't buy it, and fortunately it was mainly there to kick off the story.

As with my last encounters with the author's work I appreciate her complex worldbuilding but am left wanting on the emotional side of her writing.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounding up cos it was a very nuanced book but a bit confusing at first. Some action but, per usual for Cherryh, much of it is psychological. I think it could be a read-alone despite being part of a larger series.

[Samantha (AK) · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the fascinating (but ponderous) station politics of Downbelow Station, Merchanter’s Luck was a brisk adventure story; I devoured it within hours. It’s been ages since I did that for anything longer than a novella, and while Luck is short, it’s not that short (I’d place the wordcount somewhere around 75-80k). It was exactly what I was hoping to read, and worth the 2-week library wait.

Sandor Kreja, last of his name, has been skating by on small jobs, luck, and a touch of fraud for most of his life. As the sole surviving owner of a Merchanter vessel, he’s traded across Union space under false name and registration for years, swapping identities when the debts piled too high or the profit margin too low for him to slip beneath notice. But it’s a hard life; Merchanter crews are all family, suspicious of lone operators. Alone on a ship full of ghosts, Sandor’s time is limited.

Allison Reilly was born into the 1,082-soul crew of the jumpship Dublin Again. The Reilly name means a lot among Merchanters, but Allison knows, despite her ambitions, that the odds of a ‘posted’ crew position coming open in her lifetime are slim. A chance meeting between her and Sandor in a dockside bar opens up the possibility of new opportunities… if she can trust him.

Bear with me a moment. I’ll admit, given that premise, I was prepared to slog through some kind of torrid cross-class romance subplot. Instead, I found myself treated to a tightly-paced and psychologically-astute tale of adventure, ambition, and loss.

Perspective is split evenly between the disintegrating Sandor and the ambitious Allison, who each learn something about family and teamwork. There’s a race through jumpspace, pressure from the authorities, and a handful of cameos from the Downbelow cast. (That said, I promise this book can be read standalone, and I might recommend that, depending on your reading preferences).

Sandor has a lot of issues, and with good reason. He’s been without trustworthy human contact for a decade, and the decade before that was limited to two other people. Early on in the book he makes some really dumb decisions, which was frustrating even though I understood why he was making them. It was a very impulsive-human moment, and I think that’s what I like about Cherryh so far: she has an exceptionally good grasp of what makes people tick in illogical ways.

Allison is young, and ambitious, but not stupid. She spends most of the book as the one with all the power; even before they’re on the same ship, the class divide between her and Sandor is clear in the difference between how they handle money, trade deals, and unexpected situations. Cherryh’s Union/Alliance books are hardly post-scarcity, and it shows.

I won’t say there’s no love story here, because there is one, but it sits at a low simmer, and the ending is very quiet and very human. Satisfying, without promising a perfect future.

It’s not without flaws, of course. There were a couple of rushed moments in the middle, and one rather dated conversation on gender roles between Allison and her cousin Curran, but overall it was a wonderfully engaging book, and one I can see myself rereading more than once.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a space opera, set in the Union-Alliance Universe. This book can be read as a stand alone.

This is a story of love and trade, family and allegiances. The story is told by two main protagonists: Sandor Kreja and Allison Reilly. Sandor is the sole survivor of an attack by a Company’s ship, which pirated their supplies during lean times. He runs the ship alone, in clear violation of rules and works ‘on edge’: he is under false papers for both himself and the ship. Seeking for an assistant on a station he meets Allison and instantly falls in love with her. Allison is from a giant family ship, with over 1000 strong crew, who are the family. She wants to work on helm but rejuv plus large family means she has almost zero chance to ever get her hands on ship’s command.

They have a sleepover, an old practice of family ships to get some gene diversity from outside. Finding out that her ship, Dublin Again goes to Pell, he does a crazy stunt and rides his empty ship the same route without external help or even necessary recovery periods after jumps.

A new view on the same universe. Earlier, I read Downbelow Station and Cyteen and both of them are more ‘grand’, showing grandiose changes. Here is a small life story of small people, who just go with the flow just trying to survive. The Author’s style is quite sterile and detached and her love story is quite unusual.

[Quartzen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read one of Cherryh's Alliance/Union novels, but I still find it one of SF's most well-fleshed-out settings, and I love that Cherryh tells both large scale and smaller scale ones within it.

This is decidedly a smaller scale story, about Sandor Kreja, a young man who is the last remaining survivor of a small merchant ship after an attack by pirates when he was a child and the death of the few other survivors after that, and about Allison Reilly, a young woman from the much larger family ship Dublin Again, a Name familiar on every station, who has ambitions to a high place in the crew by finds herself way down in the chain of command and unlikely to move up it for decades because of the rejuv technology that keeps her elders and seniors healthy and working into their hundreds.

Sandor's reckless decision to push himself and his ship to their limits to meet Dublin at its next port of call after he and Allison spend a pleasant night together (sleeping off-ship being a necessity in the setting, and sleeping with company being a norm) brings him the unwanted attention of both Pell station authorities and the enigmatic and dangerous Captain Signy Mallory, bent on hunting down pirates- her former Mazianni compatriots in the war detailed in Downbelow Station.

One thing leads to another, and Allison Reilly ends up bailing Sandor out with Dublin's money and pull, stepping into a position of command on his ship with a few of her junior officers, and together, if uneasily, they set out to deliver a military cargo direct from Mallory through dangerous, possibly pirate-infested space.

The story is small scale, but it also feels... slight, in a way that doesn't entirely have to do with its short length (roughly 200 pages in mass market paperback; I read it digitally as part of the omnibus Alliance Space). Sandor is a pretty typical Cherryh male protagonist beset by trauma and guilt and anxiety, Allison felt like a cipher at times despite the sections in her POV, and overall things were just a bit too straightforward plot-wise, lacking the elaborate complications I'm used to in Cherryh's work. Things also go fairly smoothly and without too much dire cost- overall, despite the darkness of the past, it feels like one of Cherryh's more upbeat and optimistic stories.

Ultimately, I think it might have felt fresher if I hadn't read other books in the setting before, or other Cherryh works generally- everything that's done here, the psychological study of Sandor, Allison's ambition, the depiction of life in space and the unique shipboard cultures, is all done better in other books of hers. This was an enjoyable story, but it won't be one of my favorites.

[Tammie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a companion novel to Downbelow Station. It lacks the large scale, complex plot and political machinations that were in Downbelow Station, which resulted in this feeling like a much lighter read. The book does, however have an interesting character study of the main character, who reminded me of both Han Solo, and Malcolm Reynolds, but without the sense of humor. He's a man who is dealing with past trauma, has PTSD, and I really wanted to get more info on his past than I got from the book. There are snippets here and there of what happened that help the reader get the picture.

This book is built around a love story, or tries to be, but the love story kind of fell flat for me. I enjoyed reading about the characters, but never really felt what was supposed to be between them, and I think that's kind of how I felt about the book in general. I liked reading about the characters, but never really felt that I connected with them the way I wanted.

I listened to the dramatized version and it was enjoyable, but I'm not sure yet if I will read any more in this series.

[Allie King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I think this book is a representation of Cherryh at her best.

Complex, refreshing world-building, eloquent but not overly-verbose prose that's a joy to read, and tight story-telling - but not so tight that it leaves the narrative dry and uninspired. The book takes you on a roller-coasted ride of spacer element of the Alliance-Union universe, dwelling more on the nature of FTL travel and its specifics within this universe - about the technical side through the eyes of the starship captain Sandor Kreja, and about the realities of living as a perpetual ship-confined traveler through the eyes of the ambitious young woman from the well-to-do Merchanter family. The characters - just two PoV's this time - are also somewhat younger and less experienced than Cherryh's usual fare, which made the book a "lighter" read in the sense that it was much more restrained in its application of the heavy emotional burden of galactic political scheming and back-stabbing that's found in a lot of her other works. Oh, it had its fair share of scheming and plotting and emotionally-damaged people, but the book did well with evenly interspersing the moments of despair with hope and some human connection that I walked away feeling more like a reader and less like a tenderized pork chop.

All in all, this was a worthy successor to Downbelow Station.

TWO points I want to clarify:

1. This is not a book about romance. This is a book about PTSD, emotional trauma, trust issues, and ambition in a world that doesn't care. Yes, there is a connection between a male and a female character, and yes, they have sexual relations that are afforded maybe three sentences out of the entire book. But the story itself is not about their blossoming relationship, nor is any part of the main plot heavily related to said relationship past its use as an inciting incident. So, romance-phobes like me, fear not and read on. This won't be a case of a plot derailed for the sake of romance.

2. A lot of people seem to have taken to using "Han Solo" as a descriptor for the main character. That is the furthest thing from what the character actually is and the only thing similar between them is that they're two individuals of the male persuasion who sort of own the star ship they operate. Han Solo is an archetypal "bad boy" - arrogant and criminal. The main lead for Merchanter's Luck - Sandor Kreja - is lonely, emotionally damaged and prone to giving in to anxiety, trying to make an honest living and save his ship in a harsh world where he and his ship are pretty much obsolete. So... I'm not sure where the two became associated, and to be honest the main reason I held off from reading this book was because it was described as having a Han Solo-esque character for a main male lead. Again, that is simply not the case.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as its great epic predecessor, Downbelow Station, but it does know its place in a serviceable way. I find Cherryh to be something of a genius, but her prose can often be excruciating. It's not that it's bad, it's just that's it's often larded with hard sci-fi jargon specific to whatever universe she's writing about, coupled to a modernist's murky sense of character. For the uninitiated this can be, at times, quite a challenge. A 200 page book can seem like a 400 page one. Still, there are some wonderful moments, such as when hard-luck rogue merchanter captain of the Lucy, Sandor Kreja, sees Alison Reilly, the maybe-beautiful crew member of the powerful merchant ship Dubliner Again, in a smoky space bar. It's kind of like True Love or Neil Young's "Hurricane" except you're never sure what emotional investment each has since character motivation is often hidden from the reader. It's wheels within wheels, both of them eventually trying to use the other. The story itself is on the slender side, with a lot of internal navel-gazing taking you well past half-way point of the book. In a nutshell, Sandor desperately needs another crew person; Alison, along with others, is blocked from advancing in rank on the crowded Dublin Again, needs an opportunity -- and a ship, but without losing the lucrative financial shield and connections of the Dublin Again . Sounds dry, I know, but now enter the fascinating character of Signy Mallory, captain of the warship Norway. She has plans for Sandor's small ship, a potential pawn in larger events involving the Company Wars. I liked the way Cherryh ended this, and I'm just simply a fan of Captain Mallory. Merchanter's Luck tells a good, smaller story of two somewhat likable, resilient characters, the ambitious Allison, and the guarded, decent (but damaged) Sandor, while informing the careful-eyed reader of the larger history of the Company Wars since the events of Downbelow Station.

[Rachel (Kalanadi) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A very slow beginning that bored me a bit, but the second half was a page turner.

I struggle with really *loving* the Company Wars/Alliance-Union books. I want to, but there seems to be what I'd call a lack of compassion, or empathy, in the world and in the characters. The stories (like this and Cyteen) feature a lot of emotional, mental, and even physical trauma, but people's reactions to obviously broken and hurting characters are callous or cold or uninterested. No one is ever outright kind or gentle or understanding. Even the medical professionals are cold and brusk.

Basically, what I'm saying is Merchanter's Luck and other books in the world have a lot of mental illness and trauma but ZERO mental health providers and it really upsets me at times.

This type of scenario features heavily in this book because the main character Sandor has very severe PTSD from an atrocity that killed his family when he was young, and his isolated life has been very warped due to this. He's so broken. And no one offers him help to deal with that. Giving him a crew and friends and a girlfriend and fixing his ship is NOT going to treat the trauma that's actually causing his instability (and health problems)!

Anyway, despite this it was an interesting story by the end and made me want to continue on with the other books.

[Sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edit re-read 02/25: another Cherryh re-read, another bump up from four to five stars. Just like my re-read of Downbelow Station the background information I'd gained from reading other books in the Alliance/Union universe helped put the schemes and machinations here into the broader perspective and gave the story more depth.

Another gripping Cherryh novel set in the Alliance-Union universe. It is quite different to the ones I've read by the author so far - not only is it relatively short, it also doesn't focus on a whole planet or station over a longer period of time but on a small ship on one trading voyage, caught up in but ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of planets, wars and alliances. It feels more personal in that way. Having read Downbelow Station quite a while ago, i was a bit lost in the goings-on in the beginning, because in true Cherryh style, she just throws you right in the middle of everything and you get filled in on the details along the way. Cherryh has a unique style that I don't think is for everybody but I find it highly immersive. I'm already looking forward to my next Cherryh read.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some reason this novel felt like an expanded novella to me. I also felt it would have been a better book if it had been novella size or an even longer expanded book, especially in the battle scene.

There were quite a few characters I liked and wanted to know better. Brave orphan Captain Sandor Kreja captured my heart as he did Allison Reilly's. Ambitious Allison, eager to join the bridge, any bridge, as second in command, test herself, and shed her family Princess Power image for one of substance surprised me with her charm. Tough Curran, loyal and true -once you earned his respect and trust, seemed quite dangerous and romantic.

Pell, the Alliance and Union politics have made space dangerous for Merchanters, who now have to deal with the excessive caution engendered by the uneasy Cold War introduced in Cherryh's previous book, Downbelow Station. Merchanters must dock to pick up cargo, the only way they earn a living, and the stationer fees, as well as payoffs and illegal cargoes make life a dance of suspicion and small profit margins. Pirates called Mazianni's, which until recently included some now responsible military ships such as Mallory's Norway , use murder as well as theft to live, stealing from the Merchanters without mercy. The Kreja Merchanter family was destroyed by pirates, leaving only two frightened teenager brothers alive hidden in a compartment in the family ship. A further accident leaves Sandor on his own, lonely and desperately keeping a threadbare family Merchanter ship, Le Cigne running by himself, a near impossibility, but he proudly continues his family's tradition as Merchanter, however marginal, even while deep despair is rotting his heart away. Normally cautious, he becomes enamoured by the powerful Merchanter Dublin Again 's rich daughter Allison in a one-night stand, and follows her to Pell. Unbeknownst to him, she wants out of the safe cocoon of her famly ship where a thousand cousins are competing for the Captain's chair. She sees crewing with Sandor as a way to realize her personal ambition for eventual command. She maneuvers to put herself on Sandor's ship, but other plots are being hatched, and soon the dangerous Mallory is arranging for Sandor to deliver a mysterious cargo to a distant Station.

The ulterior motives make trust between all of the parties nonexistent. Sandor has hidden his real identity in false paperwork, unwilling to expose his family tragedy while coming-of-age; inexperienced Allison can barely keep her high class status from interfering with her professionalism as an officer of a low-class Merchanter, and Mallory plays a Machiavellian game of cops and robbers while never sweating the small stuff like the possible deaths of Merchanter crews being used as bait.

As expected, the bait is taken.

[Anissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man meets woman. Woman is way above man's station. Man falls head over heels & risks the only thing he actually has to see woman again. Trouble for man ensues. Timeless kind of story & made even more fun that this takes us back to Pell. This is a terrifically short book but a very good installment in the Alliance Space series. I loved the first Downbelow Station & have some sort of obsession with life aboard a spacestation apparently. Sandor & Allison were well done characters but that's not surprising to me given that it's Cherryh. I really felt for Sandor being all alone with only his ship & trying to make his way along. I understood why he was tired of it all at the age of twenty-seven. He really was put through the ringer on station & that made me sad for him all the more. Tally & Mallory are enough to undo the most relaxed sorts, so Sandor didn't stand a chance. Allison, took a little longer to grow on me but I understood that her hyper-vigilance was not just necessary given the situation but also, sound. Space is a dangerous place & people on both sides of the line can be prickly. I was most excited to read what was going on on Pell & the peek in at the Konstantins.

The action was well paced & of course, everything came together in quite a nice end. The thread of having no family & having one that played out between Sandor & Allison (& the other Reillys) was excellent. Sandor's yearning for that sense of community balanced so well with Allison's yearning to break free of hers in order for a true chance to let her ambition soar. While I didn't love this as much as Downbelow Station, it's a very solid installment & I liked all the characters. As this was one of the only installments in the series that I lacked, I can now get on to the rest of the series in earnest.

[Alex Bright · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded up

Not the best of Cherryh’s work, but still an entertaining chapter in this universe.

[YT BarelyHuman77]

Hey all :) Here's the script to my video review of Merchanter's Luck. Had a lot of fun with this one - feel free to take a look. Here's the video if you'd prefer to watch that! https://youtu.be/HezlkoyuePE

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Merchanter’s Luck

Merchanter’s Luck is a 1982 book by C. J. Cherryh. It’s set in Cherryh’s “Alliance-Union” universe and is also part of the loosely-connected “Merchanter” series, although it can certainly be read as just an individual novel.

Introduction
- Basically, the only reason I decided to read this book was I was procrastinating sleep one night scrolling through Reddit on r/printSF, as one does, and I saw an interesting prompt asking for people to suggest books that followed people working blue-collar jobs in space.
- And I thought that would be awesome to read about; science fiction is so diluted with tales of people saving the world and I thought it would be cool to maybe read about more of an everyday person. But yah, I found this book on that thread.
- And is it about a blue-collar worker in space? No, not really, but it’s certainly the same vibe. The main character is Sandor, a guy who is technically asset rich since he owns a merchant ship, but he’s swamped in debt so he’s really just working to make ends meet.
- Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe is set in the future. Humans are spacefaring, but at least in this book there are no aliens. The political landscape of the universe has changed, it’s now split into roughly three parts: “Earth Company”, “Alliance”, and “Union”.
- There’s also the “Manzianni” which is the major pirate gang in the universe and a big fear factor for Merchanters. I’m pretty sure the book takes place outside the solar system we know and love but it all takes place in space or on space stations anyway.
- Operating on the fringes of society are “Merchanters”, which are kinda like the space version of long haul truckers: they pick up and drop off cargo and get paid for it. Shipping is a family business, though, and so most of the Merchanter ships are operated by a single family, so like all the relatives in the “Johnson” family operate on the same ship.
- Cherryh never mentioned how continuing lineage works, but I’m just going to take advantage of ignorance and assume there’s no inbreeding and they branch out to have kids.
- So what’s the book about? Basically, the main character, a Merchanter named Sandor, crushes on this woman he meets at a space station so he goes after her and they end up teaming up and going on an adventure.

Who?
- So let’s talk about the characters. There are not a lot of them, but they are so well written. All of them. The book swaps between main character 1a, Sandor, and 1b, Allison.
- Sandor is the 27-year-old, aforementioned dude who owns a ship but it in incredible debt. He’s got some complexity to his character though, his family died to a Manzianni raid, so he spends a lot of the book coping with that trauma and his feelings of loneliness.
- Alternatively, Allison is a “Reilly” the family that operates the very profitable “Dublin Again” merchant ship, the crew members of which are called “Dubliners”. She’s not happy with her work there, though, she hates how slow the process is to move up the ranks, and she’s seeking more adventure. It’s like a paper-pushing accountant wishing they worked at an exciting, new start up.
- A lot of the fun of the characters is that dynamic between the uppity Dubliners and Sandor’s more blue-collar aesthetic. The Dubliners kind of give off that “holier than thou” vibe that people who went to ivy league schools give off. They act like they’re the shit, and they kind of are, but they’re a bit cocky.
- The interaction between Sandor and the Dubliners and the growth of the characters on both sides is really compelling and eventually rewarding as you see them grow and begin to trust eachother.
- Okay, and I also gotta mention one more thing: I love new age science fiction novels, but one thing I *despise* about them is the boys-club nature in which they’re often written. But this one is absolutely not that.
- Okay so sure, the male main character does have sex with the female main character in like the first chapter BUT Allison is not some stupid girl. She’s attractive and available but she holds her own and she’s a strong, qualified professional.
- Also, of the handful of main-ish characters there are two other women as well, neither of which are ever sexualized and one is portrayed as an exceptionally powerful badass. And the icing on the cake is that it all flows and makes sense, the progressive diversity of characters, at least in terms of gender, is absolutely not shoehorned in.

Vibe
- Okay, so next, I wanna talk about my favorite part of the book, which is the overall vibe.
- As a reviewer, the main thing I want to do, more so than explaining the plot, more so than saying what I liked and didn’t like, etc. is to portray how the book makes readers feel.
- And to a greater extent than any book I’ve read recently, Merchanter’s Luck made me feel like I was part of a universe that was ALIVE.
- A lot of books are like when a friend is telling you a story of what happened to them with people you don’t know. You understand logically what happened, but you don’t really grasp how it felt. But this book feels more like a lived experience.
- It's a world with a lot going on, in a good way. Sometimes you play open world video games and they're super fucking dead like there's no pictures on the walls and there's no NPC's with any interesting dialogue. But sometimes you play open world video games and every NPC can give you a mission, there’s always something to look at, etc. and it just feels a living, breathing universe. And this book’s absolutely feels like the ladder.
- My cozy reads are Star Wars books. Star Wars is my favorite franchise, mostly because I love that for any character that’s been in a movie for 5 seconds, someone’s written a book or a comic or something about them. It adds weight and depth to every interaction that happens in the universe. And I get the same feeling from Merchanter’s Luck.
- It does something lots of books try to do but don’t succeed in, which is make you care more about the overall universe. It instills a sense of wonder. Multiple times during the book, I found myself thinking, “oh man that’s a cool ship” or “that’s a cool character” or whatever, and that “I’d love to read a book about them or a book from their perspective.”
- And when you’ve got a compelling universe, characters and storylines just fall in line. It’s so much easier to make compelling characters that the reader cares about when the reader’s bought in to the universe of the story, and I totally was.

Tiny annoyances
- Okay so now that I’ve given it resounding praise, I gotta mention just a small handful of things that were not my cup of tea.
- All the action kind of took place in like 20% of the book. Sticking with the video game analogy, it felt a bit like an introductory mission at the beginning of a game where a large part was learning the mechanics of the world rather than actual action.
- There’s also a fair amount of explaining the political goings-on of the universe and I think it was well-written but I don’t know I don’t really care about that part too much.
- And then finally, and this is the most unfair criticism of mine, there was a lot of ship-specific lingo like galley, and bridge, and fore and aft and all that stuff, and I kinda hate when books do that. I don’t read a lot of ship books so I usually get lost or it takes me longer to figure out what’s going on when they rely heavily on words like that.

Conclusion
- I think to write a good universe, you need a healthy mix of (1) things that are explored, and (2) things that are implied and invoke curiosity. But the things that aren’t touched on need to not be confusing and more like something you’re interested in learning more about. This book misses the mark occasionally, but hits it more often.
- Sure the story was great, but I felt constantly intrigued by and interested in learning what else was going on in the universe.
- And it all wraps up with a great conclusion as well. The end feels like the end of a Star Wars movie where the credits roll, I let out a feel-good smile, and I rubbed my hands together in a display of satisfaction. I even let out an audible “Okay!” as I completed the last page.
- Before I end, I want to go on a little bit of an aside though. This is the first time in a good long while that I've just picked a book on my own terms and ran with it. I guess I got it from a Reddit suggestion but it was a post with not a ton of traction and I was just casually scrolling Reddit, rather than me looking at lists or having seen a book recommended by a book reviewer I trust or something like that.
- And it definitely added an extra fun element to the reading. Like, I feel like I owned the experience more, and while I liked the book, even if I didn’t, it was still my adventure. There's a bit of that gambling experience too that's fun and raises the stakes where I don't know I could have found the best book ever or I could have found the worst book ever.
- And because of my usually extremely anal nature of my book choices I feel like I haven't gotten to experience that a lot. I'm not saying that that's how I'm gonna do it forever but I think it's fun to mix it up and do some random-ish books because it feels different.
- So I don’t know where I’m going with this rant, but I guess if you’re someone like me who usually puts enormous effort into handpicking each book you read, relax a little and if you’ve got a good vibe on a book, maybe just give it a go! Who knows, you might have just found your new favorite series.
- Thanks for watching

[Alex LB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merchanter's Luck has many signature Cherryh elements, including singularly-motivated individuals having an unforseen part in a larger narrative, found family, and what happens when interpersonal communication breaks down and people make assumptions of one another. But it's very different from Downbelow Station. This isn't strictly a sequel to Downbelow Station, but I'm glad I read them in that order. It takes place an indeterminate amount of time after, and features what I'd call cameos from a few characters in DS.

I don't really like most of the comparisons I've seen about Sandor being a Han Solo or Mal Reynolds type. He's truly alone in the world when we meet him (no Chewie, no Zoe), and he lacks the confidence and sarcasm. What Sandor is, is a fantastic and loving portrayal of someone with PTSD, and what systems and rules they make for themselves in order to function and survive. What I liked about this novel was only having two POVs and really digging into them both. Although, I do love a good love story, and this was not the romantic novel I was sold by other reviewers. It's about trauma and trust and self-discovery more than anything else.

Where this falls a little flat is the ending that feels rushed, where our main characters seem thrust into and quickly back out of a greater narrative that I didn't quite understand. Without reading DS, I don't think I would have understood the larger political machinations at all.

What continues to impress me about Cherryh's writing is her confidence in and understanding of her world. When I get a little lost, I never feel that it's because she is making it up as she goes or because there are holes in the writing; I get the strong sense that she's telling me about something that she understands completely and I'm just not familiar with it yet. Hopefully as I read more, the world will continue to open up for me.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first sequel to Cherryh's award-winning 'Downbelow Station', 'Merchanter's Luck' focuses on the aftermath of the creation of the interstellar Merchant Alliance based at Pell Station. As a child, Sandor Krejas was one of three survivors of a pirate attack on his 200 year-old family ship. Followed by years of accidents and poor luck, he lost the remaining members of his family and became Le Cygne's captain and sole crewman. A scoundrel, Krejas is also lonely, poor, constantly terrified and desperate. Meanwhile, Allison Reilly is a young crewman aboard Dublin Again, a massive family-run merchant vessel of 1000 crewed by her blood relations. While she wants for nothing and is a member of a powerful Named association, she's frustrated that she will never be able to follow her dream, to actually pilot a vessel, as she is 25th in the chain of succession.

On a chance meeting Krejas and Reilly meet in a space station bar and have a one-night stand. However, enamored of Reilly, Krejas makes a crazed decision to follow her and, after a reckless stunt, becomes something of a minor celebrity at Pell station. When Krejas' shady past and the unintended political consequences for Dublin Again's association with him threaten to become public, former Earth Company captain turned Merchant Alliance military leader Signy Mallory seizes the opportunity to push her own agenda.

'Merchanter's Luck' is filled with CJ Cherry's crisp and minimalist hard science-fiction prose and makes for a quick yet very enjoyable read.