A man is found murdered and brutally impaled near the Seattle waterfront, and during the investigation, private detectives Dave Crowell and Alan Brindos come face to face with an alien drug known as RuBy. It’s a dangerous prototype that’s bound to cause problems for the eight worlds of the Union. The murder case itself would be easy enough to solve—that is, if the suspects weren’t already dead, and the Seattle Authority cop sharing the case wasn’t Crowell’s disgruntled ex-partner. A prequel to The Ultra Thin Man, this novelette features Crowell and Brindos before their Network Intelligence Organization contract, scraping out a living in a city—and on a world—the Union is quickly forgetting.

In the twenty-second century, a future in which mortaline wire controls the weather on the settled planets and entire refugee camps drowse in drug-induced slumber, no one—alive or dead, human or alien—is quite what they seem. When terrorists manage to crash Coral, the moon, into its home planet of Ribon, forcing evacuation, it’s up to Dave Crowell and Alan Brindos, contract detectives for the Network Intelligence Organization, to solve a case of interplanetary consequences. Crowell’s and Brindos’s investigation plunges them neck-deep into a conspiracy much more dangerous than anything they could have imagined. The two detectives soon find themselves separated, chasing opposite leads: Brindos has to hunt down the massive Helk alien Terl Plenko, shadow leader of the terrorist Movement of Worlds. Crowell, meanwhile, runs into something far more sinister—an elaborate frame job that puts our heroes on the hook for treason. Crowell and Brindos are forced to fight through the intrigue to discover the depths of an interstellar conspiracy. And to answer the all-important question: Who, and what, is the Ultra Thin Man?

Dave Crowell is a hero of the eight worlds of the Union, but he doesn't want fame or fortune. These days he just wants to run his private detective business with his partner and forget about the Ultras, the insidious aliens that attacked the Union, then vanished. But a client turns up dead under mysterious circumstances, and Crowell knows the Ultras have not gone away. With the help of a beautiful alien, he uncovers fragments of memory that might lead to his missing father. When it becomes clear that Crowell's past also contains the information he needs to save the Union, he is caught up in a conspiracy beyond his understanding and pulled into an underworld drug war on a hostile planet. With the crisis deepening, Crowell must learn the answer to the biggest question of all: Where are the Ultras?