In this "crackerjack novel" from the author of Vigilant, a band of misfits on a suicide mission face a war-torn planet (Robert J. Sawyer). In the fourth volume of the League of Peoples series, Alexander York is one of the High Council's most iron-fisted admirals. When his children, Samantha and Edward, were born, he paid top dollar to have their DNA altered to insure they grew up perfect physical and mental specimens. But when Edward ended up with a faulty brain, his father sentenced him to join the Expendables, a band of misfits and the deformed mandated to explore the most dangerous parts of the galaxy. Accompanying his sister on a mission to Troyen, an anguished planet and home to the Mandasar, Edward finds himself in the middle of a civil war and is ultimately exiled. As violence escalates, Edward struggles to navigate a treacherous path with the assistance of none other than Festina Ramos—the greatest Explorer of all.