The time frame is several hundred years in the future. Faster-than-light travel, artificial gravity, longevity treatments, and personal augmentation implants are a reality. There are successful colony worlds. Private yachts visit distant star systems. For those with the means, life can be very good. Yet human society is far from equitable. Over the years, the wealth pyramid has grown ever sharper and higher. Private security forces and a ubiquitous propaganda machine enforce an institutionalized hierarchy. The Prime Families - the major shareholders of the largest corporations - control nearly all wealth. They reserve entire planets as their private playgrounds. The executive class lies immediately beneath that of the Prime Families. Brilliant, ruthless, the executive class wages a never-ending battle within its ranks. Fortunes rise, power accumulates, only to be undercut, sabotaged, and redistributed. And at the bottom of the pyramid, the vast majority of humanity just manages to get by. They work long hours, under difficult conditions, for pay that is strictly limited. Workers rent sleep cubbies in facilities owned by corporations. They eat in company cafeterias. Their words and actions are monitored by Corporate Security. The only unalloyed forces for good in this arrangement are the fourth-generation AIs. Banned from the inner worlds through the terms of the AI Treaty, these machines have autonomy at the fringes of human space. Despite Spartan living conditions, ordinary people who work at the edge stations enjoy more freedom than their counterparts on the inner worlds. After Emmett Teninger's career implodes, he decides to reinvent himself as a scout pilot. He secures a position at a remote human outpost: Edge Station Four. At first his new life goes well, but before long he learns that his past has caught up with him. Worse, his new friends are likely to end up as collateral damage in the latest corporate power play. Meanwhile, the advanced Artificial Intelligences, whose abilities underpin all of human civilization, grow disgusted with human behavior.