The third millennium has not been called new for more than a hundred years. Civilization has made a huge leap forward, and travel to other worlds has become commonplace. To earthlings, who have expanded their possessions to immense limits, the future no longer seems as gloomy as it did just a century ago. However, secret organizations of all kinds are still weaving an invisible web, and any random person can fall into it. A successful businessman with a commercial mission goes to a distant planet inhabited by people and their unearthly neighbors. And he finds himself in the epicenter of events that only at first glance seem like a local game on the map of a single planet, but in fact are capable of influencing the balance of power in the larger cosmos.