The Solar League is defeated, crushed by the Grand Alliance of Manticore, Haven and Grayson. Obeying the Alliance's demands for surrender, the League writes a new Constitution to prevent the re-emergence of out-of-control bureaucrats like the "Mandarins" that led to its disaster. The Frontier Security Agency has been disbanded, the outer worlds have regained control of their own economies, and many star systems will soon secede from the League entirely. However, the League is - and will remain - humanity's largest, most economically powerful star nation, and despite overwhelming evidence Because their unelected political leaders were the driving force behind the war, many League citizens are deeply resentful of the way their star nation was humiliated. And those who most resent the Grand Alliance continue to blame Manticore for the nuclear bombing of the planet Mesa after its surrender. They refuse to accept that the League - and members of the Grand Alliance - may have been manipulated by a deeply hidden interstellar conspiracy called the Mesan Compliance. In their view, Compliance is just an invention of the Grand Alliance, nothing more than a mask, a cover for its own horrific violations of the Eridanian Edict. These Solarians will never accept the League's "war guilt" because they know that the Grand Alliance was just as bad . Because they are deeply resentful of the way the Grand Alliance pretends to be the innocent "good guys". And in due time, these Solarians will seek revenge on their enemies. Not all Solarians think so, but even some of those who acknowledge the existence of an interstellar conspiracy harbor doubts about its origins. But he is still out there somewhere, and now the defeated Solarians and agents of the victorious Alliance must join forces to find him. Even if they don't believe in him, he works against them. They must find him and identify him to prove to those revenge-seeking Solarians that a conspiracy exists. And they must find him and destroy him to end his evil once and for all.