Plague Ship

The Solar Queen has won exclusive trading rights to a new world, Sargol, a planet of crimson hills and stranger dangers. Dane Thorson, barely more than a boy, serves as cargo-master-apprentice on this pioneering voyage, his first real taste of the spacelanes. The dream posting becomes a nightmare when the crew discovers something precious and terrible buried in those alien hills. What they mistake for gems drags them into conflict with the Salariki and corporate rivals willing to kill for the same prize. Then the plague strikes. By the time the Queen limps toward Terra, only three apprentices remain alive. They must land a dying ship while defensive batteries prepare to blast them from the sky, because to the Patrol, they are the contagion itself. Dane and his friends are hunted, quarantined, and left with nothing but each other and a ship that nearly killed them. Norton's 1956 masterpiece builds tension like a fist around your throat. The real treasure of Sargol was never gems, it was the test of character when everything falls apart. This is space adventure at its purest: young people in over their heads, making impossible choices, surviving through nerve and luck and the stubborn refusal to die quietly.