Finding Tiggly Freelance Courier, #0.5

A teenage girl wants to buy a spaceship from a vegetable alien's lot of used and refurbished vessels. What could possibly go wrong?

Angela "Gel" Colson has spent the last year having adventures. She'has s beaten a crooked casino, outwitted an alien ambassador, and even helped an old friend. Now she has a new business plan and promising opportunities await her. To get them, all she needs to do is return her leased spaceship.
There's just one problem: The ship is falling apart around her even as she nears her destination. Her shields are failing, her comms are offline, the navigation computer believes someone else is the current lessee and won't give her helm control, and the interstellar transit portal she's racing toward has raised its defenses to block her access.

But Gel only appears to be Human. She's actually a mutant variant from a race of teleporting aliens who have hidden in plain sight for millennia. To move forward with her life's plans she must regain control of her ship, return it to the used lot, and convince the owner to sale her a ship, but the only vessel she can possibly afford is an obsolete craft that's sat on the lot for more than a century and belongs in a museum not out among the stars.

An introduction to the FREELANCE COURIER series, "Finding Tiggly," is the story of how Gel acquires Tiggly, a Tiglarian Thistler class vessel, the likes of which hasn't been seen in civilized space in ages.