Anna’s success as the Eastar NIA station chief has catapulted her into the position of Director of NIA Stations. Anna is uncomfortable with the promotion and bored. She has a master chief secretary, a lieutenant aide-de-camp, and fifteen commanders and their staff to do the work. But she suspects not all of her commanders are happy with their new, very young admiral or are doing their jobs. But she has no way to observe those commanders as their stations reside on distant systems.
A personal request from Admiral Webb to look into a friend’s missing daughter solves the bored problem and provides Anna an excuse to tour her NIA stations. While dealing with resentful station chiefs, she discovers women who meet a very specific profile are being kidnapped across the UAS. Anna manages to unravel the mystery, but because of the profile, she finds stopping the criminal organization and freeing the kidnapped women will take years, during which time more women will be kidnapped and fewer will survive to be saved.
Unless ... Anna is willing to disregard the laws that safeguard the innocent and that are protecting the criminals and very influential people the criminals’ activities support. Actions that will open her to prosecution and life imprisonment if plots to retire her early and permanently don’t succeed first.
Clem Daems is a native of Chicago and a graduate of the University of Arizona. He served twenty-two years in the US Air Force and has worked as a software engineer, course developer, and adjunct professor teaching mathematics and computer science. He began his first novel at age seventy, several years after his retirement. His first novel, coauthored with Jeanne Tomlin, was a 2010 Eppie finalist in Fiction/Fantasy. Daems is an active member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife.
Gabrielle de Cuir is a Grammy-nominated and Audie Award-winning producer whose narration credits include the voice of Valentine in Orson Scott Card’s Ender novels, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan, and Natalie Angier’s Woman, for which she was awarded AudioFile magazine’s Golden Earphones Award. She lives in Los Angeles where she also directs theatre and presently has several projects in various stages of development for film.