Karla Elwis has to pay the bills somehow. Fuel isn't free. The problem is when you're a necromancer not too many of the living want to hang out. She's on a trek across the stars looking for her brother and that isn't cheap either.

The Valraiths are in the habit of pressganging anyone they run across to man their ships, and that's just what happened to him. It was either work in the reactor room or take a plasma blast to the head. Karla doesn't know where the space pirates went, but she doesn't need to interrogate them. Once they're dead, they'll tell her everything she needs to know. Now she just has to follow the trail of broken ships and looted bodies floating through space. The only problem is the one thing people like less than pirates are necromancers.