Story takes place years after the great mercenary war on Blackworld. Mouse Storm is back to Confederation Lunar Command and serves as a special operator in the Confed's intelligence service. Here he is paired with his colleague from Academy, man living under so many names that he is on verge of forgetting his real name. Man now known as Moyshe benRabi.

Story starts with Mouse and benRabi entering the service with Sainers, legendary Starfishers, in role of tekkies. Reason is that Seiners need people to help them around their ships for the time being. Result is not that good for Seiners - instead of expected thousands only several hundreds signed in. And in these hundreds majority are members of intelligence services from all over - Confed, Sangaree and various other corporations and mercenary/pirate outfits.

All of these espionage elements have the same goal - find out the secrets of Seiners and how they manage to get to the "gold" from the dragons, "gold" (I truly cannot remember the name of the materiel) that is basis of advanced technology for all species in the universe.

Of course, since we are talking about Mouse Storm, things get complicated with entrance of mysterious Sangaree woman, agent from one of Sangaree Families or maybe the ruling council itself. And here we get a background on the conflict and we are presented with how Mouse fights his own vendetta against Sangarees even while working on other tasks.

Suffice to say (because I do not want to spoil anything, book and trilogy in general is excellent) things get .... problematic (?) .... for our duo and very soon they will come to realize that Seiners are not just dragon herders but there is something more in their actions, actions with which they try to hold something more sinister at bay. And Mouse..... well there is more about him too, but we are yet to found out what exactly is his goal.

As always this is great action SF. Technology is integral part of the story and it is very cyberpunky but it does not run the show. People and story do - and here I have to say author's military background comes to the front - entire plot, action and espionage sound and feel very authentic and real (entire SF setting not withstanding).

Excellent book. Only minus that I see is that it does not have a definitive end (it is book number two after all) and it ends on a cliffhanger.

Now to read that final book in the series :)

Highly recommended. ( )

Starfisher #2 ( )