Eva refuses to do it and starts to fight back, but her penchant for attracting trouble is hard at work. Then The Fridge instructs her to do something that completely violates her personal ethics. Lies aren’t a very good basis for relationships of trust, and her crew begins to suspect something’s wrong. Her ship has been partly colonised by psychic cats, and she’s falling in love with her engineer, a state of affairs that’s apparently quite mutual, while lying to her whole crew (including said engineer) about what’s going on while she tries to work out how to pay off The Fridge. An encounter in a bar (where she turned a rich bloke’s proposition down with added punching) means that a deeply unpleasant (but powerful) emperor is pursuing her with all the might at his disposal, and a violent disregard for civilian casualties, in order to forcibly add her to his harem. Unfortunately, Eva also has a knack for attracting trouble. The Fridge wants Eva to do their dirty work this time: she has both the skills and the motivation, since she loves her sister.

Things are going reasonably well for Captain Eva until her sister Mari is kidnapped by a mysterious and largely mythical criminal syndicate known as The Fridge, which holds people hostage in cryosleep until their ransom is paid, or until the poor schmucks who value the kidnapped person have gotten themselves killed doing The Fridge’s dirty work. (Eva Innocente has a Dark Past, but unlike so many of literature’s Dark Pasts, it’s not lovingly dwelled on and brooded over – it’s only mentioned occasionally as explanation for some of her skills and attitudes.)

Her cargoes are small and her profits even smaller, ever since she broke with her not-exactly-all-aboveboard father and the crew of smugglers and mercenaries she used to run with. Part of me wishes I’d already read Chilling Effect, her debut space opera novel, at that point, because I’d like to ask how many of the little things that look like nods to Mass Effect and the likes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are there on purpose, and how many are the product of a shared cultural moment and shared sensibilities.Ĭaptain Eva Innocente has a ship, La Sirena Negra, and a small crew. I met Valerie Valdes briefly at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon.

Valerie valdes