Joseph Rannen is dead, and no one besides Morgan Kimball seems to believe he wasn't a traitor. With greedy Earth warships hovering overhead, Kimball has twelve hours to produce evidence that his friend and mentor was murdered, preferably without jeopardizing the colony's safety.

This whodunit mystery set on a distant colony planet was a finalist for the Writers of the Future Award. It is also included in the collection Dead Men Don?t Cry: 11 Stories by Nancy Fulda.