Team Fugazi arrived uneventfully at Spicer VII and were placed into a parking orbit before being permitted to land at the ground based spaceport in the local morning. The Paradroid had not arrived, but was due in that night.

Captain Kerns authorised shore leave in shifts, but that was all thrown out the window when he spotted Grace Chang across the crowded terminal. She was speaking into a public comm booth, and very agitated. Drake was unable to tap the public line, but when she stopped and spoke into her own personal comm, he cracked the Imperial encryption code she was using and listened in on her conversation.

She was speaking to a male and there was some crackling on the line, as though it was coming from a long distance. She told him that 'it is down to one in seven, but they are holding out for one in ten'. She also let on that she was going to be meeting with 'them' at 1200 that day. She called them 'UP' and Trilby informed the team that this could be Universal Pharmaceuticals, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Company. The team guessed that Grace was speaking with John Wallace, the ex-Finance Minister for Velke, recently unmasked as an Imperial spy.

Drake attempted to follow Grace when she left the spaceport, but she noticed him and gave him the slip. However, he was able to get the address number of her comm unit.

Using voice modification systems aboard the Iron Fist to make him sound like John Wallace, Drake called her and told her that the plans had changed. She should meet with a contact at another hotel at 1130. She appeared to believe him, but she did test him by making a call back. Drake was expecting this and intercepted it, reassuring her (in Wallace's voice) that he was the one who had made the call.

However, it didn't exactly go as planned. Instead of Grace turning up at the rendezvous, a troop of armed Anthropos and murrk arrived instead. Drake was not willing to engage in a firefight in a populated area, and escaped before being discovered.

Team Fugazi met at Grace's hotel, in a seedy area of the city. There were two people waiting there who looked very out of place in black suits and sunglasses. Drake turned on his hologuise, walked straight up to them and told them that they were expected, and could they follow him please. They introduced themselves as Mr Logan and Mr Foss. Mr Logan was the talkative one. As he went up in the lift with them (and after he was in too far to be extracted gracefully), Drake came up with his plan. He would hide in plain sight and listen to their conversation. Grace would assume that he was with the UP men, and the UP men would assume that he was with Grace.

Drake took up a bodyguard's position near the door to the room. Neither Grace nor the UP men were willing to question his presence. Meanwhile the other members of the team took action to block access to the floor and keep an eye on Grace's real security at either end of the hallway.

He found out that Grace was manufacturing a synthetic version of the Zin-shee drug tuphoo (called tuphoo two), but it was toxic. The Company was willing to buy the formula and samples for 2 million company credits, but only if Grace could reduce the toxicity to one death in every ten users. They gave her 24 hours to achieve this or the deal was off.

Drake escorted Mr Logan and Mr Foss back to their limo and they drove off. Grace made another call to (presumably) John Wallace and left the building in her car. The team now had her registration number and that of the bus that transported the group of Anthropos and murrk to the failed ambush. The team returned to the Iron Fist in order to use its equipment.

Sharris hacked the vehicle registry and found the addresses for both Grace's car and the bus. The car was registered to her hotel room, but the bus was registered to an address in the warehouse district. The team sat down to plan. It was decided that it would be best to steal Grace's data, but leave her in place as an agent under surveillance. This way they could grab her at a later date, preferably before she began her next scam.

Treesh went out on the street to try to contact the local importer for true tuphoo. She found the drug baron Warren Fritz quickly, and learned that he was planning a strike on the factory that night. The wheels were in motion, and he could not stop what had begun. She got samples of the real tuphoo and the synthetic version, for comparison.

She suddenly remembered something about the mysterious gift of earrings that she had received from an unknown benefactor on Velke. One of her collaborators in the revolution back on her home planet had a pair of earrings exactly the same. Those ones opened up to reveal a tiny storage container in each earring. She tried it with hers, and indeed they opened to reveal a white powder. This was later analysed, and it turned out to be true tuphoo.

A message was intercepted from Grace's comm unit advising that a new batch of the drug had been produced, and she was distributing it to her contacts on the street for 'testing'.

The team went to the warehouse district, which was near the starport. Sharris' sharp eyes saw that the place was heavily defended, and scans showed that there were plenty of murrk armed with disk weapons. Drake suited up and waited in the Iron Fist's transporter bay just in case things went sour while Ezreal took on the task of tapping the factory’s computer. This would require installing an uplink chip to the computer itself, located in the basement of the warehouse.

Most of the armed defenders were in the catwalks and gantries of the warehouse, so Ezreal Ghost Walked to the basement and with judicious use of the Radiate Fear power cleared the lab. He had to rematerialise in order to install the uplink, and was surprised by one of the defenders, who fired a blaster at him. It didn't stop him from installing the chip, and he Ghost Walked away as Sharris uploaded the data. No sooner had the last byte arrived than the defenders smashed the uplink. The team transported back to the Iron Fist, their mission completed.

That evening Warren Fritz's gang attacked the lab. They were a gang of ten lowlives armed with clubs and petrol bombs. They were cut to pieces by the well-armed and disciplined Imperial shock troops. Fritz himself escaped. Team Fugazi anonymously advised the local authorities of the lab and the firefight that had just taken place, but when the police arrived, the lab was gone.

The Paradroid finally arrived, and the Iron Fist docked. Tok had some bad news. He had found an infestation of alien bugs on the Staterooms deck. He transported about a thousand of them to the isolab on the Research deck, and also found an egg cluster with several thousand eggs. The bugs appeared to eat almost anything, including metal, but ship's systems were still at 100% and there were no signs of infestation elsewhere on the ship.

As the Paradroid left the system, scans showed an (apparently) unarmed Imperial Swordship entering the system from the Guild side. Drake whisked off a last minute message:

"Hugs and kisses, love Drake"