hire Rica Dawnstar, a mercenary bodyguard, and acquire the services of Haviland Tuf, a not-very-successful trader. Their destination is a so-called "plague star," known to inflict disease and pestilence on every third generation of a small, remote world. It turns out to be an enormous, abandoned seedship of the long-defunct Federal Empire's Ecological Engineering Corps, developed by the Corps to rewrite genetic coding for entire planets, for good or for ill. Tuf's ship, the Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices, is damaged by the seedship's automated defenses, and three of the occupants, Nevis, Anittas, and Dawnstar, board the seedship by means of pressure suits, betraying and leaving the others to await eventual death through asphyxiation. However, Tuf locates a microchip allowing him, Waan, and Lion to land the Cornucopia safely on the seedship. Nevis, who has stolen a bulky but extremely powerful alien exoskeleton from Tuf's ship, violently forces Anittas, a cyborg, to invade the ship's circuits. In the process, Anittas's suit is torn, and he contracts a plague from the air. Alarmed by this brutality and worried Nevis will use his suit's power to subjugate her as well, Dawnstar runs away from Nevis, ultimately finding the vast seedship's control room. Anittas, meanwhile, betrays Nevis, releasing several of the ship's macroscopic bioweapons, including acid-spitting "hellkittens"; hyper-aggressive, carnivorous, bat-like creatures; spider-like, unimaginably sharp-edged organisms known as "walking webs"; and a T. rex. Furious at his treachery, Nevis kills the dying Anittas. Meanwhile, Waan, Lion, and Tuf have found the armory, but have split up due to disagreements on leadership. They quickly discover that the air is poisoned with various plagues, which Waan determines using one of Tuf's cats, Mushroom. Tuf recognizes that Mushroom is infected by the plagues and is dying, and kills him gently, preventing Mushroom's further suffering. He discovers the cloning room of the seedship, and clones Mushroom using the ship's equipment, naming the new cat Chaos. Waan is found by the hellkittens, which spray her with acid and corrode her helmet, impairing her vision. Disbelieving Tuf's warning, she takes her helmet off and contracts a plague. When the hellkittens return to eat her, she is not only weakened by illness but unprotected by her helmet. Though mostly paralyzed and dying, she manages to activate a grenade, destroying herself along with the hellkittens. Lion, meanwhile, sets a trap for Nevis in a corridor by rigging a plasma cannon