A government agent’s career rests on his ability to settle a four-way claim dispute over a newly discovered planet. When he arrives there, however, he discovers that not just his career, but everything he thought he knew hangs in the balance of this negotiation.
Munir is an agent of the Buschil government’s Office of Conflict Resolution. His official purpose is simply to make certain that difficult situations conclude without violence. Four claimants—a quadrillionaire, a mining company, a settler colony, and a scientific research group—argue for supremacy on a lush, newly-discovered exoplanet with a total population of nineteen. The negotiation is civil for now, but there’s no telling how long that will last. Munir has also been secretly tasked to manipulate all claimants into losing interest in the planet, in order to preserve it for some undisclosed but highly illegal purpose by the government itself.
One unforeseen complication makes both tasks difficult: a bizarre natural phenomenon unique to the planet which, for some reason, only seems to affect Munir.
Living with a small group of strangers in a luxurious, illegal estate on an unsettled planet, with little real authority, few resources, and only a vain hope that his strange reaction to being on the planet’s surface isn’t dangerous to his health, Munir is wholly unprepared for just how horribly off-the-rails this assignment can still get.
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