SF Collectors' Edition: Floating Worlds

The Styths, a powerful and aggressive mutant race from the Gas Planets, Uranus and Saturn, have been launching pirate raids on ships from Mars, and Earth's Committee for the Revolution has been asked to mediate, to negotiate a truce between the Middle Planets and the Styth Empire. The task of conducting the talks falls to the intelligent, resourceful and unpredictable Paula Mendoza.

Paula's initial meetings with the Stythian warlord, Saba, and his unruly band of bodyguards and advisers, are not promising. Then Paula, in keeping with her anarchist heritage, adopts a less conventional approach and appears to achieve her objective. But the consequences for Paula are considerable and she finds herself on the floating cities of the Gas Planets, the only, tenuous link between Earth and the Styth Empire.