Search Worlds Without End

Tracker is the sixteenth installment of CJ Cherryh's acclaimed Foreigner series.

It's been a year of upheaval, since Bren Cameron's return from space--a year when he and the aiji-dowager, one of his most powerful atevi allies, returned home from their two-year interstellar mission to find the government overthrown and their world in chaos.

Now, at last, things are calming down; the Assassins' Guild is functioning again, working out its internal difficulties, and Bren is settling back into his routine: not as Lord of the Heavens; not--to his regret--as Lord of Najida peninsula, where his leisure estate is located; but as paidhi-aiji, an official in the atevi court.

His current ambition is to keep himself and his bodyguard out of harm's way, and to shepherd the aiji-dowager's daring new trade agreement through the appropriate legislative committees. Combined with Tabini-aiji's recent appointment of his young son Cajeiri as his official heir, Bren's workload is challenging, but at least things on the atevi world seem to be on the right track.

Something is coming, however, quietly, stealthily, just the first ominous twinkle of a new star in the heavens...

It's been a year of upheaval, since Bren Cameron's return from space--a year since he and the aiji-dowager, one of his most powerful atevi allies, returned home from their two-year interstellar mission to find the government overthrown and their world in chaos. Now, at last, things on the atevi world seem to be on the right track, and Bren hopes that life may soon become much more tranquil.

But something is coming, quietly, stealthily--just the first ominous twinkle of a new star in the heavens....

Knowledge about the dangerous situation in adjacent space rests only with Bren Cameron, the human diplomat to the alien court of the atevi, four starship captains, and the two chiefs of state -- both the human and the atevi, who share the planet.

Bren is obliged to carry the just-signed treaty to the human government on an island some forty miles off the shores of the atevi-ruled megacontinent, and -- without explaining the dire situation that would send the people into chaos -- to arrange for the human refugees who are crowding the space station to be landed on the island, since the atevi will not grant more land to the human residents of their planet. Bren, a native of this island, is now an atevi official -- trying to prepare the human inhabitants for the arrival of many more desperate human refugees from space.