Labour organizer Padma Mehta is on the edge of space and the edge of burnout. She's supposed to recruit 500 people to the Union, but she's thirty-three short. When a small-time scam artist tells her about forty people ready to tumble down the space elevator to break free from her old bosses, Padma checks it out. Of course, it's all lies: the forty people are really six and they're really corporate espionage agents. Their mission: stop a plant disease that could wipe out all the industrial sugarcane in Occupied Space, even if it means sterilizing the planet from orbit. Padma has to fight her way through the city's warehouses, sewage plants, and up the elevator itself to save her job, her planet, and her sanity. Then maybe she can finally have a drink.