 McKell had been on Meima under orders from Uncle Arthur, his superior, to find Cameron and help him out of whatever trouble he was in, with taking the job as the "Icarus"' pilot a maneuver to that end; landing the "Icarus" on Beyscrim had merely been bait to bring Antoniewicz out of his cover.The book concludes with the crew celebrating their rescue, while Cameron makes plans for smuggling the "Icarus" back to Earth for research.A secondary plot thread (and a complication of the main plot) involves a chemical dependency (possibly related to a rare and fatal neurological disease) of one of the crewmen.