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Fargo owes nothing to the Pan Humana. He turned his back on them long ago, when he was stripped of his identity, his class, his position, and all the other ties to human civilization enjoyed by its billions upon billions of citizens. Fargo joined the ranks of the Freeriders. To themselves, Freeriders are interstellar gypsies, the disinvested and therefore the truly free. To most of the rest of society, to the Invested, they are parasites, freeloaders, bums.

But now Fargo finds himself caught up in events that are dragging him back into the folds of human culture and forcing him to choose sides in a struggle to determine the future of humanity in the galaxy.

The aliens have come to make treaties, to interact with a paranoid humanity, to bridge the gaps that separate them. They do not understand the resistance they encounter and enlist aid where they can. Among those they pick, Fargo is their most unlikely choice. He is also their most dangerous choice. To the humans opposed to embracing the new future offered, Fargo is representative of everything they reject, a threat to everything they hold important and fear to lose. He is an outsider, unwanted, unwelcome, in many ways a barbarian, yet indispensable to both sides. For himself, Fargo has his own reasons for going all the way to Sol, to Earth, into the heart of power. Fargo has touched an alien mind.

When Cira Kalinge signed on with the Armada, she thought her staid, provincial family disowning her was the worst thing that could happen. Then the Secession happened and she found herself on a carrier heading for the Distal colonies to carry out a suppression of other humans, humans who had apparently chosen to cast their fortunes with nonhumans in defiance of the Pan Humana edicts severing all contact with the seti races. And when she ended up the sole survivor of the entire fighter contingent of her task force, grounded on Finders during the worst days of the chaos of open rebellion, living precariously for the day the Armada returned to reclaim Finders, the last thing she expected was to be betrayed by the very service for which she had given up everything else.

For Alexan Cambion, volunteering for combat duty seemed the ideal way to justify his father's faith in him, fighting to preserve the Pan Humana. But when he returns to his homeworld--Finders--shot down and captured in the first open engagement of the Secession, he learns to his dismay that every action he has taken since leaving Finders for Armada service has been exactly the opposite of what his father intended, and the welcome he expects becomes a nightmare.

Sean Merrick did not start his career as a double agent, but as the Secession began he found his sympathies siding more and more with the secessionists. As the battle of Finders rages and he travels the boundary between the Distals and the Pan, he learns how impossible it is to stay aloof and uncommitted.

In the end, all of them must decide between loyalty and morality, family and integrity, duty and truth.

Decades after the Secession, humanity is still split. The isolationist Pan Humana and the expansionist Commonwealth Republic live on either side of their mutual boundary, the Secant. Crossing the Secant is illegal, no matter which side you start from.

Trade Tamyn Glass is on a well-paying and mostly legal run when she is contacted by Benajim Cyanus--a man she doesn't know, piloting a ship that isn't his, pursued by people who intend him harm. He carries a plea from an old friend that Tamyn can't ignore. Sean Merrick, richest of the early founders of the Commonwealth, is dying, and his last wish is to be buried on Earth. That means crossing the Secant and breaking the law.

But that's only the start of Tamyn's problems. Merrick is trying to live beyond his natural lifespan: he has loaded his persona into his ship, the Solo, and turned it over to Benajim--a man who has no memory of his past and owes his present to Sean Merrick. One man has placed them all in a moral, ethical, and legal dilemma that threatens everything they know, and there's no time to consider. They have to decide, and decide now. Their choice will have profound consequences. For everyone.