Book One of the Wayfarers series.
Rosemary Harper is a young woman in trouble. Running away from a notorious past that she did not create, she has spent all her considerable fortune on a new identity and an escape from her home planet of Mars.
In her new identity, she has been hired as a clerical assistant to the captain, Ashby Santoso, of a private spaceship. She will be in charge of scheduling some stops and overseeing ordering of supplies and helping the captain organize his files and set up an archive of the captain's records.
The spaceship, named Wayfarer, is a private enterprise for hire. Captain Ashby and his crew build "tunnels" through space that are short cuts to manage the vast distances of space travel, basically stabilized "wormholes." It's a small crew, only nine members, including the captain and the built-in Artificial Intelligence that helps run the ship. Mostly composed of humans, three of the crew are not human, including the pilot, the navigator and the medical person/chef. And the AI, of course.
Of this mixed company, all are pretty much decent people with the exception of the navigator and the human in charge of the tanks that produce the algae-based fuel that helps power the ship. The navigator keeps to itself and the human is just unpleasant. Another source of power, for more the power-intensive chore to tunnel building, is ambi which a type of raw energy produced by black holes or other high energy phenomenon.
Captain Ashby's operation is small time, compared to the huge tunnel manufacturing ships that take on the bigger projects. But a friend gives Ashby some inside info that enables him to be the first in line for a much more ambitious and lucrative project located near a planet held by the Toremi Ka, recent members of the Galactic Commons (GC). The Toremi are known to be rather blood-thirsty and their being admitted to the GC is likely based on the huge source of ambi near the planet held by the Toremi Ka. A questionable decision, certainly, given that the GC usually require that member species have reached a high level of technology and social advancement. While the Toremi are technologically advanced, their willingness to kill each other seems to indicate their lack of social advancement. But in the Toremi's case, the GC's greed has overruled common sense. And Captain Asbhy's crew and ship will be the ones to pay the price for that greed, unbeknownst to them, as they set out on a lucrative new job that will hopefully allow them to expand the capabilities of their tunnel-boring operation.
The book is mainly about the crew, how they get along with each other and work together to benefit of them all. Basically a crew of really decent and skilled persons, with very little conflict, although there are a few problems as can only be expected of people who live together for long periods of time in restricted conditions.
The small angry planet of the title is Toremi Ka. My copy of the book was about 400 pages long and they only arrive at Toremi Ka after page 332. So the majority of the story is about the trip and the people onboard the Wayfarer and their interactions and the problems encountered on the trip.
The story continues in the second book of the series, A Close and Common Orbit. I have put it on my wishlist because this was a pretty good story and I want to know more about the adventures of the crew of the Wayfarer.
