Free Traders in Space

Captain Pyater Welloons owns the free trader Long Gambit. A tramp starship, it carries cargo across interstellar space – whenever Welloons can find a payload and wherever it needs to go. Interstellar civilization is dying. More are planets losing space travel, yet Long Gambit is irreplaceable. No one is capable of making interstellar starships; only maintaining them until they break.

Long Gambit, by Ken Lizzi, finds Welloons and his ship planet-bound on Pradesh, a wealthy and healthy planet. Welloons and Long Gambit are neither. The ship has been arrested until moorage fees are paid, and it needs repairs Welloons cannot afford.

Then Welloons finds a cargo. Maybe. Someone needs to run 12 million doses of medicine from Ixtpa to Owming. It is a tricky deal. Welloons has to source the medicine himself when he gets to Ixtpa. The advance will cover his moorage fees, the most critical repairs he needs to make, and the cost of buying the medicine at Ixtpa. The delivery fee will be almost pure profit.

It is a gamble. Everything has to go right. The alternative is selling Long Gambit, so Welloons decides to take the risk.

Does everything go right? Of course not. On Ixtpa its pharmaceutical industry is mainly interested in making mind-altering pharmaceuticals for Ixtpa’s population. Most of the population is drugged out. Finding someone sober long enough to make the medicine Welloons want to buy proves challenging.

Once past that, he must contend with equipment failure and space pirates. Meanwhile, the planetary government of Owming is more concerned with avoiding foreign cultural contamination than with distributing the medicine.

This is not empire-building military space opera. It is a working crew adventure, showing the challenges of operating a business during civilizational decline. The technology is undergoing slow erosion. Planets are looking inward. Trade is dying.

Welloons must navigate these challenges to keep Long Gambit flying. He also has to find qualified people to operate his ship in an era where finding them is increasingly difficult. The alternative is finding himself and his crew stranded on a planet with no way off. Along the way, he has to confront his past and the choices he has made.

Long Gambit offers a thoughtful look into how a spacefaring society works and how it starts failing to work. It explores those who do their best to keep darkness from falling, in a fast-paced adventure with surprising twists.

“Long Gambit,” by Ken Lizzi, Raconteur Press, July 2026, 232 pages, $15.99 (paperback), $5.99 (e-book)

This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.