The Lady with the Dog

The future brings new opportunities for everyone. In the galactic underbelly you can’t tell where bureaucracy ends and piracy begins. Generals on the stellar frontier steal entire planets, burn evidence with fire from an atomic blast, and sell people into slavery together with ships and crews. Only don’t think they do it for themselves—this is all at the request of relatives and acquaintances. After all, corporations really love cheap resources and free labor… And as for the fight against piracy, that’s handled by the most notorious state thieves.

Inquisitor August McKinby is not interested in such matters—there’s federal security for that. But August knows that, day by day, his assistant, Della Berg, will be crawling into that dirtiest of places. One man has died, another has gone missing—and the traces of both have vanished where ordinary people don’t go. Della won’t be able to stop: it’s family business. She’ll have to fly to a place where there is neither order nor law. Or maybe even farther—where the danger index is «zero» and ships get crushed into pancakes.

Russian counterintelligence and a Siberian cyborg will go with Della.

A good team, if you need to «find and neutralize».