Chapter 1: What's Long and Hard and Full of Spacemen?
<p>In the year 2205 C.E., the outer reaches of space are no place to daydream. The Octoplex were beaten off thirty years ago but every human feels the slime of their amorphous appendages on the backs of their necks when the lights go out, sees shadows of slurping, wriggling Octoplex armadas in distant gas clouds. But William Pocatello has a more immediate problem: he's been called before the merciless Frip Inquisition, and awaits a public humiliation worse than death. Now, as he pilots his crew far from the safety of the core worlds, his thoughts are far from the perils of the wild, wet unknown.</p>
