Ed Carew and his small ragtag crew are smugglers and ne'er-do-wells, thumbing their noses at the Expansion, the vast human hegemony extending across thousands of worlds... until the day they are caught, and offered a choice between working for the Expansion and an ignominious death.
They must trespass across the domain of humanity's neighbours, the Vetch - the inscrutable alien race with whom humanity has warred, at terrible cost of
life, and only recently arrived at an uneasy peace - and into uncharted space beyond, among the strange worlds of the Devil's Nebula, looking for long-lost settlers.
