Nimisha's Ship

Nimisha's Ship is a science fiction novel by Anne McCaffrey, published in 1993. Its setting is the decadent world of Vega III, where Lady Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense has grown up out of step with the rest of her class and its appetite for intrigue.

Nimisha prefers the shipyards of her father, Lord Tionel, the owner and principal designer of the famous Rondymense yards, and she is gifted enough there to become his secret assistant and, after a shocking tragedy, his chosen successor. That choice passes over his designated body-heir, the callow Lord Vestrin, and it is an insult Vestrin and his mother Lady Vescuya will neither forget nor forgive. Nimisha is preoccupied with her father's ambitious plans for the Mark 5, an experimental long-distance cruiser, and she discounts the danger at home until a solo test flight of the Mark 5 leaves her marooned light years away on a planet both deadly and beautiful.

The novel divides its attention between Nimisha's survival far from home and the struggle over the shipyards she has been taken from, where her daughter Cuiva shows the same ingenuity as her mother and the same enemies.