K.E. Voss

The Meridian Fetch is a seven-person long-haul freighter running a standard route between colony systems. Chief Engineer Paz Reyes walks the engine room every morning at 0412, listening to the ship speak in the language of pressure differentials and thermal variance. She knows every tick, every vibration, every subtle departure from normal. On day eighty-seven of the transit, a coolant fault in the secondary manifold leads Paz to a sealed door she has never opened. Hold 4. The manifest says consolidated machine components, Class 7, bonded cargo. What she finds when she opens the door is not machine parts. It's people. Forty thousand of them, in cold suspension. The cooling system is failing. The clock is running. And Paz has to decide what to do about both. CARGO is not a novel about chases or battles. It's a novel about a decision—how it gets made, what it costs, and what happens to the people who make it. The crew of the Meridian Fetch must reckon with what they've been carrying, who put it there, and why. They must also reckon with each other: Captain Sable Vorn's precise authority, Tomás's card games and hydroponics experiments, Wren's annotated books, Callum's efficient silence, Mira's navigation charts, and Rho's elaborate coffee rituals. As the cooling fails and the options narrow, Paz must do what she has always done: think in systems, identify faults, map solutions, calculate costs. But this time the cost is measured in lives she can count, and the solution may require her to become something other than what she has always been. Paz Reyes is a pragmatist. She has never wanted interesting work. She has wanted work that could be depended on. Now she has work that depends entirely on her, and the manifest was always a lie.