Jack “Ack-Ack” Black had spent decades as a cog in the galaxy’s greatest military machine, he’d scrimped and scraped all that time to achieve independence. Now he was a free trader with his own ship. He’d graduated from cog to pawn.

Jack thought he had it made. With a little help from friends he'd survived a pirate conspiracy to monopolize the sector's trade. He'd thought he was free to trade between the stars as he'd always dreamed of. Only now his friends wanted him to fill the vacuum that pirate monopoly had left. It was a stretch even before powerful interests moved to stop him.

Jack's a bigwig now. Playing in the big leagues. Boss of the biggest shipping and trading company in the sector. Controls most of the interstellar FTL freighters available there. It's an asset of great strategic significance. It's attracting a lot of unfriendly interest. Can he handle it? (By way of pleasing the Gods of the River of Literary Plenitude, and any other sentient beings fond of categorization this is a Space Opera Adventure with military and trading elements as major themes. It has both marines and space fleets. Space carriers, space destroyers, star fighters, and interstellar freighters. Spies and politicians make an appearance. Difficult choices and luck, good and bad, abound. Good fights are fought and won sometimes, but usually at some cost.)