Dr. Jareen's body turns up in the recycling pile on Argus Station.

No marks.
No struggle.
No explanation.
The station logs show nothing went wrong.

Yet Dr. Jareen is still dead.

An enigmatic list scribbled moments before his death: Project Argus. The Watchers. Breach. Koplyck. Melas. Barbarant. Song. And at the bottom, underlined twice: Delia.

Detective Constable Dack Speedle has spent twelve years policing Argus Station, a BarCor commerce hub orbiting a lonely star at the edge of inhabited space. He has seen everything under the sun.

He has never seen anything like this.

The suspect list runs from an emotionally distant widow to an overly eager research assistant. From a nervous recycling chief to a mysterious cabaret owner. From a corporate enforcer to the Argus Chief Optimizer.

What research was Dr. Jareen working on that somebody would kill for?
What is Project Argus and who authorized it?
Where is Paka Symone?

Speedle is trying to reconstruct the events, but at every turn he slams in to a wall. A BarCor wall.

The investigation will take Speedle from the gritty Lower Decks of the station to the sprawling so-called Cathedral on the barren surface of Eos, where BarCor has built itself an empire in the ruins of a planet.

A sixteen-year-old girl found the body.
She saw the face of the killer.
She stayed when she could have walked away.

She should have walked away.