Once again, Nandia and Bernard find themselves facing another Galactic Grand Council objective beset with uncertainty and danger. The monarch of planet Aesir, King Sabre, can be fouling his own nest. Inflation veers out of control, poverty levels are growing like topsy and companies relocating off-world. The monarch, tipsy at the best of times, has installed incompetent cronies to key government positions.

Reviews are that Sabre vehemently blames a former, at this point renegade, Council delegate for about Nandia’s Apparition the precipitous decline in his planet’s economy. And, instead of acknowledge responsibility for his own misdeeds, the Ruler condemns the delegate for wide-spread rumors that he is becoming unhinged. Figuring in the list of The King’s woes add a palace haunting from the tone of his personal father, plus blood alcohol levels that surpass manufacturer’s specifications.

Nandia and Bearns arrive while Aesir’s vendor starships are getting plucked out of the sky by hyper-drive privateers. A tyrannical warlord from a distant desert planet provides commissioned the vessels to buoy up his own failing economy. Can be this the beginning of an arranged coup d’état? By using an immortal chambermaid and a teleporting kitty, our two Council delegates must unravel this mess before King Sabre, and the earth Aesir itself, self-destruct.