Pillage, plunder, mayhem, and wicked magical tattoos... That sounds like the perfect life for pirate Captain Maggy Low. Her life is a dream of violent chaos if you don't count the fact that magic causes her first mate's brain to melt until he turns to a beast intent on eating his fellow crewmates. Maggy decides that her new goal for plunder is healing nanites that will keep the magical malady from destroying her first mate. Her reward is just what a pirate might expect from doing the right thing by a shipmate: Prison. Instead of her normal good, clean fun, Maggy gets to see what her enemies in the Alliance view as a good time: prison, slavery, and to be sold off to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, her new adventures mean she'll face an old enemy, get caught stealing high-level nanites, lose ship and crew, and become the property of the Alliance to do with as they will. Though Maggy returns to the sea, it is as a prisoner-in-transport under the control of the metal-accoutered Alliance captain, Jonah Sloan. Unfortunately for Maggy, Sloan views her like the rabid dog her first mate had become, and she ends up on the selling block and under the heel of her own father-turncoat, Ned Low. Maggy must face down the devil that made her, make allies of enemies, and find a way to break free from the technology that would keep her a puppet forever. It's all for the one thing she loves more than herself: the MadCap. Of course, you can't keep a good pirate down...