Auditor Rina Vasquez asked one question on the Ouranos Dismantlement Ring, and died the same day.

Commander Tanis Richards arrives at the ring the only way she can: twice. The Kirby Jones docks at Segment Nine as a Terran liaison detachment—boring, by design—with a Weapon Born in the commander's chair wearing Tanis's face. Tanis herself walks down the ramp as Elin Marsh, the replacement auditor from Corvane Assurance, and takes a dead woman's office, a dead woman's kettle, and a dead woman's question.

The ring is eating a planet. A thousand mass drivers fire a river of frozen hydrogen at Jupiter, eleven seconds between heartbeats—and somebody has been skimming the river. Thirteen lots this quarter, manifested as slag, aimed at a buyer who won't take delivery for a hundred years.

On the ring, the maintenance chain owns the galleries, the logs, and the suit Tanis has to wear to get near the rail. On the ring, the chain is as close to a god as the project allows. The chain also has a new supervisor: a careful man with a new face, who has his own agenda.

On Vesta, Harm Ellis stands before an Aequitas to answer for how he came back from the dead, and for the machine that brought him. And Colonel Leona of the Jovian Spectres is on the ring for reasons she can't tell anyone, least of all the Terran commander who recently saved her life in Dublin.

Tanis has an auditor's slate, a borrowed suit, and Darla. Everyone on the ring says don't stand near anything.

She's going to stand under everything.