Journalist Tim Pennington has chased the secrets of the Taurus Reach further than anyone outside Starfleet, and now he reaches a turning point in that search. Kevin Dilmore tells it in Pennington's own voice, a hardboiled first-person investigation set just after the events of Reap the Whirlwind. One of the four novellas in the Vanguard anthology Declassified, it is the series at its most noir.

Summary by Loreful, from public sources

Placement