IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED — HIRE IT DONE!

What does a big corporation do when a job is too dirty and dangerous for its own employees? Why hire a freelancer, of course. That's how salvage operators Gwynne Heikki and her sidekick Sten Djuro find themselves commissioned to make their way to the surface of an undeveloped planet where they are to find and return a lost cargo. Dangerous, maybe, and dirty certainly, but the job seemed simple enough — with just enough complication to make it "interesting": the fact that the cargo locators had failed in the crash; that the place swarmed with dangerous animals; that the worst of those animals was of almost human intelligence and more than human ferocity... But there were a few problems that the company didn't tell them about... It was almost as if their employers wanted them to fail — and to die in the process.