Once the city of Carrig stood supreme on this planet that had seen settled by space refugees in the distant, forgotten past. From every corner of this primitive lost world caravans came to trade—and to view the great King-Hunt, the gruesome test by which the people of Carrig choose their rulers. Then from space came new arrivals. And with them came their invincible death guns and their ruthless, all-powerful tyranny. Now there would be no King-Hunt in Carrig, or hope for the planet—unless a fool-hardy high-born named Saikmar, and a beautiful Earthling space-spy named Maddalena, could do the impossible . . .

Colonising a new planet requires much more than just settling on a newly discovered island of Old Earth. New planets were different in thousands of ways, different from Earth and from each other. Any of those differences could mean death and disaster to a human settlement. When a ship filled with refugees from a cosmic catastrophe crash-landed on such an unmapped world, their outlook was precarious. Their ship was lost, salvage had been minor, and everything came to depend on one bright young man accidentally among them. He was a trainee planet-builder. It would have been his job to foresee all the problems necessary to set up a safe home for humanity. But the problem was that he was a mere student - and he had been studying the wrong planet. (First published 1974)

When the star Zarathustra went nova, the desperate survivors spread out in all directions. Those that found habitable worlds were few and after hundreds of years the Zarathustra Refugee Planets were either forgotten or in quarantine. On Cyclops, an advanced world, an ominous political crisis had developed which threatened to oust the Corps Galactica. Something horribly improper was going on. . . something involving its corps of medical wizards. . . something that might have to do with an undiscovered Zarathustra planet. Gus Langenschmidt's job was to save the Corps base on Cyclops. But it proved to be a life-and-death task on a multi-planet scale.