Darktraders

From the back cover of the DAW first edition: "House Starborn would be the ruin of an "honest" darktrading smuggler like Butterfly St. Cyr unless she could get Tiggy, the young hellflower heir to the chief diplomat of the AlMayne mercenaries, safely back to the Starbringer family's home world fortress. Yet with her former partner Paladin - the death-to-possess Old Federation artificial intelligence - gone off on a private mission of his own, Butterfly didn't have anybody to back her up when Tiggy's enemies decided to give the word "ambush" a whole new and all too final meaning. And when she did get Tiggy home, it turned out that not only wasn't AlMayne a safe haven, it looked like it might become Butterfly's final "rest in peace" port of call. But even at the risk of her life, there were three things Butterfly couldn't leave the planet without: a new ship; the only existing data about illegal A.I.s like Paladin - a must if she was ever going to track her wayward computer comrade down; and Tiggy, who, she'd quickly discovered, would surely be one dead hellflower if left alone among his "loving" kinfolk for any length of time..."