The ship is a stubby bathtub. The cargo is stolen antiquities and seven people who’ve been asleep for two centuries. The employer had been jettisoned before take-off. And the ship’s transponder codes are not locking into the Ripple gate.
Vizier Streak has been in worse situations. Probably.
Dead Reckoning is a space opera serial following a cargo pilot who takes a job that is straightforwardly bad and gets worse in ways that are not entirely straightforward. The story runs on mysteries that predate its characters. Complications arrive without warning. And you can feel that specific misery of being stuck in a small ship with people you never planned to meet.
Dead Reckoning updates in episodes. Reading order matters. Start at the beginning.
Contents:
What kind of story is this?
The short version: found-trouble space opera with a mystery underneath.
The longer version: Dead Reckoning sits somewhere between the grimy pragmatism of a Firefly-type crew-in-space story and a locked-room mystery where the room is moving through underspace at several times the speed of light and the lock may have been set two hundred years ago. The tone is dry. The stakes are real. The humor is mostly situational and mostly unintentional on the part of the characters.
Do you like stories where competence is demonstrated rather than announced? Where problems don’t resolve cleanly, and where “probably fine” is not actually reassuring? Then this is for you.