The war is over. An age of exploration, using knowledge Ray Longknife gained from a computer on a frontier planet, has begun. It is a wild and wooly time with anyone with a spaceship or any government or corporation that can fund one sending explorers out to try to find a new Earth.

It is also a time when space pirates are out exploring and raiding and pillaging.

Ray Longknife and his wife Rita are both ministers of Wardhaven's Ministry of Exploration. They are doing their best to get mothballed ships space worthy and sending them out to explore. But too many ships are going missing. So now the Ministry is tasked with finding out what happened to them.

When a ship comes racing back shouting about aliens, Ray and Rita need to find out if humans have finally actually made contact with an alien race. The only problem is that the first contact has been made by pirates who are much more interested in the alien's gold planet than doing anything diplomatic.

Needless to say, humans haven't made a great first impression. Can Rita, Ray and their various crews find the aliens and make peaceful contact? ( )