A short recounting of events that took place prior to the opening of this book, events that are fully detailed in the novel Acorna, also by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball:
Three asteroid miners Calum Baird, Declan “Gill” and Ratif Nadezda were at the beginning of one of their long collecting journeys when they discovered, floating in space near the asteroid where they were working, a life-support escape pod of unknown origin and its single, sleeping occupant. The occupant was clearly humanoid yet not quite human; this was not as much of a problem for the miners as the fact that they had suddenly been saddled with the care of an infant-and a female one at that! Yet, having no desire to stop working a profitable asteroid belt to bring the child back to their base, they had no choice but to keep and care for her as best they could. In a few days, they loved her as they would a child of thenown. Then the child’s unusual qualities became obvious-she could purify water and air, she learned with astonishing speed, and she matured even faster. Within the single year of their voyage she grew as tall and mature as an adolescent human girl.
When they did finally have a large and valuable enough load to return to their base, they found that MME had been taken over by a larger company, Amalgamated Mining. This change in ownership, as well as Amalgamated s desire to assume all control over the waif whom they had named Acorna, proved unacceptable to the three miners. When they and their “ward” fled, officials at Amalgamated pursued them with claims to ownership of the ship, which was the miners’ only means of livelihood-untrue claims which could nevertheless keep Gill, Rank, and Calum tied up in Federation courts while their resources were drained by legal expenses. In desperation the miners turned to Rank’s remarkable
Uncle Hafiz, the wealthy and more than slightly shady owner of an interstellar financial empire.
Hafiz arranged to swap the identifying beacon of their ship for one belonging to a wrecked vessel with Kezdet registration. Although the miners were uneasy about adopting the registration of a planetary system with which they had had some difficulty in the past-a small matter of disputed mining claims-they had no option but to accept the offer and pay part of the price Hafiz demanded-a substantial percentage of their profits from the last mining journey. The rest of his price, though, was unacceptable to them. A dedicated collector of rarities and one-of-a-kind treasures, Hafiz was fascinated by Acorna’s short horn and delighted by her precocious ability to understand the numbers he loved most-gambling odds. He demanded that the miners leave Acorna with him and clearly planned to keep them prisoner until they complied. Rafik outwitted his uncle in a series of clever maneuvers which freed them but left them on the run from even more enemies than they had had before: not only the minions of Amalgamated Mining, but also the Kezdet magnates who had caused the wreck of the ship whose identity they had “borrowed.” In addition, they had a third enemy they did not even know about. Hafiz Harakamian was so impressed by the way in which Rafik had outwitted him that he decided this nephew was quite clever and crooked enough to be a worthy heir to the Harakamian financial empire -in contrast to his worthless, bungling son, Tapha. Hearing about his father’s plans to disinherit him in favor of Rafik, Tapha decided that the only way to keep his inheritance was to find his cousin and kill him.
After a precarious time spent moving from system to system, trying to sell off their payload without being caught by any of their numerous pursuers, the miners were finally captured by Pal Kendoro, a young man working for Delszaki Li. Li had been a friend of the real owner of the ship whose identity they had borrowed, and when his agents discovered the ship’s beacon again in use they assumed the miners had killed the owner and hijacked the ship.
Although based on Kezdet, Delszaki Li was no friend of the Kezdet government and their quasi-military police, the so-called Guardians of the Peace. In fact, he had quietly funded an organization which worked to subvert the ruling class of Kezdet. The wealth of Kezdet s few was based on the sufferings of the many; its low-tech mines and factories were served by unwanted children brought from nearby systems and kept in bondage by a semilegal system which treated them as debtors who must work off their debts. The factory owners saw to it that the children’s nominal wages were so low and the charges against them for food and shelter so high that they never “worked off any debt, but remained in perpetual bondage. Few survived to adulthood, and those who did were so debilitated by years of poor food and crippling work that they had no energy to challenge the system that had enslaved them.