Chastity Snowden Whyte just wanted to mine for rocks and ice in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Mining was all she knew. It was all she was good at doing. She was comfortable living alone as the captain of her mining ship The Sedona. Normally, she managed with only infrequent trips back to base on the planetoid Ceres for resupply.

She didn't want to have to make extra trips back to base because of equipment failure. She didn't want to become a mining tutor for a group of newcomers from Earth. And she certainly didn't want to get entangled in conspiracies, piracy, kidnapping, and murder.