Leli, a young space pilot, is charged with stalking the salvage ship Gathering Moss as part of a resistance to the galactic domination of the Euphoria Corpocracy, a hybrid government and corporation that has enslaved most known worlds with a nanoplague. The infected are made docile and completely receptive to the whims of the corpocracy’s stakeholders. Leli’s mission is to recover any useful materials from whatever site Gathering Moss is attempting to scavenge.

Leli’s spaceship is inferior to the corpocracy’s fleet, but she is able to keep up with the sophisticated salvage ship through the process of wake-riding. By remaining out of Gathering Moss’s sensors and radio waves, Leli can ride the waves of spacetime generated by the larger ship. Leli arrives behind the salvage ship at the site of an abandoned generation ship. Both Leli and the crew of Gathering Moss board the stranded vessel, and Leli must race to complete reconnaissance without the Euphoria crew noticing her.

In her search, she discovers a cryochamber of dead bodies. She determines they were rebels trying to escape the Euphoria’s oppression. As she is surveying the bodies, she notices that some of the individuals have the mark of infection by the nanoplague. Leli is puzzled and wonders why Euphoria minions would be traveling with rebels. After analyzing the marked corpses, her computer tells her that even though the bodies were marked, they contained no traces of the nanoplague. Leli realizes that these individuals were cured of the nanoplague. Energized, Leli resolves to bring back a specimen to her rebel organization. The only way to ensure the sample of the cure is sufficient is to bring back an entire body, so she begins to make her exit with an entire cryo-pod. Her struggle to extract the pod alerts the Euphoria crew, and she is forced to make a quick getaway.

Confronted with the possibility of pursuit, Leli rips a hole in the stranded ship, killing the Euphoria crew on board and ensuring she can make her escape. Though she has successfully made it out with the pod and her life, Leli is wracked with guilt over killing the Euphoria crew. The revolutionaries she works with do not approve of massive killing, and she worries that they will reject her specimen because of the massive loss of life. Leli accepts that there is nothing to be done now, and as she waits for another ship to tow her back to familiar space, she begins penance for the lives she took.