James May and his crew of mercenaries had successfully rescued the fabled Essence Phials from the clutches of the Yueh-sheng crime syndicate. The bad news is they lost half their crew and their ship had been blown to space junk, leaving them adrift in space. So when rescue comes, the Angel's Luck survivors are happy to see it. Until it turns out their rescuer is May's ex-wife, complete with an asteroid-sized chip on her shoulder. And her ship is carrying a diplomatic delegation of Arcolians, aliens who have just ended a long, brutal war with humanity, bringing with them a hotbed of political intrigue. Add to that his copilot, who is carrying with him the skills – and xenophobic tendencies – of an Arcolian war hero, and the situation is ripe for catastrophe. If May ever needed a special kind of luck to survive, it was now...