Green World recap

James McGill traces stolen migration supplies from Central's docks to Green World, where the Claver network is equipping an anti-Earth rebellion. Legion Varus enters Skae territory, raids the planet, and discovers enemy infrastructure beneath its ocean. Kraken, dogmen, and a solid-water dome trap the ground force until Galina Turov uses McGill as cover for a devastating bombardment and abandons the island troops. The strike appears to halt a simultaneous gateway attack on Central, but Etta is killed and Earth faces a diplomatic crisis. McGill, Florimel, and the Investigator recover Etta's archived mind and rebuild her in a body partly derived from Natasha Elkin. McGill escapes prosecution by directing Governor Knox toward Abigail Claver. In the closing material, Etta admits attacking Galina and chooses exile on Dustworld with Florimel and the Investigator, while McGill and Galina resume their relationship.

Previously: James McGill serves as a centurion in Legion Varus, working under Galina Turov in a relationship shaped by both military authority and personal history. His associates include Central technical director Florimel, specialist Natasha Elkin, and his daughter Etta. McGill has experience with Green World, alien societies, revival technology, and missions that cross political boundaries. Abigail Claver belongs to a family network with a history involving McGill, while Drusus holds high command authority over Earth's military response. Legion service routinely allows the dead to return when usable biological records and engrams survive, but permanent death remains possible when those records are destroyed or unavailable. These established connections place McGill between Legion Varus command, Central's technical systems, and people willing to work outside ordinary legal channels.

Galina Turov recalls James McGill from leave to investigate migration supplies disappearing through Central's docks. Working without Legion insignia, McGill learns that seven inspectors have vanished and boards a cargo ship called the Sea Empress. A crewman shows him a clandestine device that removes selected goods from sealed containers and can also transport people. When armed men close in, McGill activates the system and is sent far from Earth. He arrives alone on Green World and finds warehouses filled with stolen industrial material, weapons, underwater gear, and automated defenses sized for a substantial nonhuman force. Abigail Claver catches him inside the complex. She acknowledges working there but denies leading the operation. McGill explains that he followed the dock thefts and tries to convince her to abandon the enterprise. She responds by shooting him, leaving him apparently dead beyond Earth's normal communications and revival support.

McGill awakens after revival at a remote base in Rigel territory. A renegade mercenary commander describes cooperation among worlds hostile to Earth's expansion and asks McGill to arrange an Earth revival for him. McGill instead sends the commander into the base's singularity power system and escapes with an unwilling Saurian revival specialist caught in his transport. The Saurian dies during the long trip to Central, but McGill preserves a claw and his recorded mind. Florimel, who still cares deeply for the specialist, concludes that standard revival cannot restore him without a body. She and McGill consult preserved intellects in Central's restricted vaults and learn that a replacement might be grown illegally from usable cells. They carry the claw to Dustworld and approach an experimental biologist who grows organic bodies of several species outside conventional revival systems. The Investigator has even regrown McGill before. His work offers a possible path to reconstruct the Saurian, though the limited biological sample makes success uncertain.

The Investigator cannot regrow the Saurian from the damaged claw, so Florimel accepts a riskier transfer into a newly grown male body. The revived specialist recognizes his companions but is appalled by his unfamiliar blue-scaled form and becomes unstable. Back at Central, Etta notices that he has no official record. McGill meanwhile reports the Green World warehouses to Galina, who identifies Abigail Claver in his recovered footage and prepares Legion Varus to find the rebel base. Natasha Elkin begins analyzing McGill's tapper data for the planet's location. The revived Saurian then abducts and murders Natasha as revenge against McGill. After McGill confronts him, the specialist accepts that Florimel intended to help and agrees to assist the investigation. Natasha is revived and initially demands his death, but joins the technical work after learning about the irregular reconstruction. She and Florimel locate Green World inside Skae territory, turning a domestic smuggling inquiry into a dangerous cross-border operation.

McGill briefs Drusus, who orders covert infiltration rather than open war in Skae territory. Galina and McGill revive the renegade commander through an unauthorized facility so he can provide access codes. After killing the technicians who restore him, the commander claims the rebellion plans to attack Earth and offers to guide the mission through his former province. Drusus sends Legion Varus aboard Dominus immediately, retaining the commander as a prisoner-guide and ordering McGill to watch both him and Galina. Winslade commands the voyage while Galina remains at Central to transmit the mustered troops aboard. At the Province 926 border, Natasha secretly monitors the guide's changing authentication sequence. Winslade permits her to assist, and the guide successfully convinces automated sentries that Dominus belongs in the province. The ship enters undetected, but the guide warns that an attack on Green World will bring pursuit and make the return crossing far more dangerous. McGill keeps that warning from command.

Concern spreads aboard Dominus that the expedition has no viable escape plan. During an unannounced live-fire exercise, McGill's unit defeats experimental drones by dragging them underwater, proving the machines unsuitable for Green World. Graves publicly disciplines McGill but privately approves of exposing the flaw, then assigns him to a one-way casting reconnaissance. McGill arrives at the abandoned shoreline facility without equipment or a retrieval method. Engineered dog-like humanoids capture him and take him to a restored island base staffed by several rebel species. A Claver family leader confirms that McGill's prisoner-guide defected and warns Skae command to change the border codes. Six days later Dominus arrives and destroys the island's defenses. The Claver woman releases McGill during the assault, and they flee together until he takes control of their aircraft. Varus troops overrun the base. The Claver woman tries to escape with a plasma grenade, but the blast kills her and mortally wounds McGill. The landing force records his condition and kills him at his request so he can be revived.

Revived aboard Dominus, McGill reports that the Green World warehouses have been emptied and that the rebels may be preparing an attack through Central's gateways. Command suspects the mission was designed to provoke a border war. Winslade tortures the prisoner-guide, but McGill enables the prisoner to seize a weapon. During the apparent escape, the guide admits that the border trap and planned attack on Earth are real, then kills McGill before dying with corrupted revival records. After McGill returns, Drusus gives Varus limited time to investigate. A cohort enters a laboratory complex and finds powered rails descending beneath the ocean. Natasha discovers that the rails preserve a narrow zone of survivable pressure. McGill's unit follows them into the depths, loses its recovery line, and finds its advance scouts dead. Large squid-like rebels ambush the soldiers on an underwater plateau. Varus defeats them with heavy losses, but an enormous dark creature now blocks the only known route back to the surface.

The underwater creature uses the unit's lost line and captured mines to pull soldiers beyond the rail corridor's protection. Natasha, Carlos, and Sargon are among those killed during the retreat, though Natasha and Carlos are later revived. McGill's survivors reach the surface, establish a large island camp, and remain uncertain whether the intelligent hunter followed them. Soon the sea forms a solid-water dome around the entire island. Massive kraken rise inside the barrier and attack. Starfall artillery eventually kills or drives off the creatures, but Legion Varus suffers severe casualties and remains sealed in worsening conditions. Most revival equipment and transport capacity have already returned to Dominus. With ordinary communication and teleportation blocked, Graves orders McGill to find a path along the underwater rails beyond the dome and establish gateway posts for evacuation. Carlos follows him as he begins another descent, while the surviving ground force waits under the dome with limited revival capability and no normal route out.

McGill and Carlos find that dogmen are using underwater passages through the dome. They hold a narrow route together until both die. Revived aboard Dominus, McGill learns that dogmen are overrunning the trapped island force while alien border ships approach. Galina Turov has him fire the transport's main guns at the dome, then arrests him to make the attack appear unauthorized. McGill orders a second barrage, damaging Dominus, and Galina shoots him. The transport abandons the ground troops and escapes by a long frontier route. Three months later, Galina revives McGill and reports that enemies attacked Central through dockside gateway routes. The bombardment of Green World is believed to have collapsed the undersea bases and ended the assault, but the opposing alien power has filed a formal complaint. Etta was killed in the Central attack, and the destruction of data cores leaves no confirmed backup for her. McGill returns toward Earth determined to find another way to restore his daughter.

Back on Earth, McGill learns that intelligence archives may retain Etta's personal records. Florimel finds no ordinary backup but joins him in breaching restricted systems, accepting the risk of prosecution. They download Etta's files and flee to Dustworld, where the Investigator demonstrates his own unregistered rejuvenation by moving into a younger replacement body. Etta's mental engram is intact, but her body scan is incomplete. Florimel and the Investigator spend weeks rebuilding the missing genetic information from available human material. Meanwhile Governor Knox accepts an edited account that blames McGill for the border crisis and prepares to surrender him alive. McGill avoids transfer by revealing knowledge of Knox's child and offering Abigail Claver as a substitute culprit. Knox releases him and redirects the case. On Dustworld, the Investigator loads Etta's mind into the reconstructed body. She awakens mentally recognizable but distressed by its younger, weaker, visibly different form. She then learns that some missing DNA came from Natasha Elkin, making Natasha an involuntary genetic contributor to her restoration.

Etta decides not to tell Natasha Elkin that her DNA was used without consent. McGill takes Etta back to Earth, but her altered biometrics prevent her from simply returning to her old Central laboratory and former identity. At McGill's family home in Georgia, she remains distressed by her changed appearance and avoids mirrors. Galina Turov arrives restored to imperator rank and confirms that Earth no longer classifies McGill as a criminal. She seeks personal reconciliation and asks whether he assassinated Governor Knox. McGill denies killing Knox and rejects Galina's approach, their trust still damaged by her decision to make him the apparent author of the Green World bombardment. Soon afterward, someone strikes Galina outside the house and leaves her unconscious. At the end of the last numbered story chapter, Etta is alive but displaced from her former life, McGill is cleared on Earth, the Green World diplomatic consequences and Claver case remain unresolved, and Galina's unidentified attacker has just escaped.

The Green World bombardment is believed to destroy the rebellion's undersea bases and end the gateway assault on Central, but Legion Varus leaves its trapped ground force behind. Abigail Claver dies in a plasma-grenade blast during the raid. The opposing alien power files a formal complaint, and Governor Knox protects her position by accepting Claver as the substitute culprit. McGill is released and is no longer treated as a criminal on Earth, while the wider rebel network and the political case remain unresolved. Etta survives restoration with her memories intact, but her incomplete body record forces the Investigator and Florimel to rebuild her with substitute human DNA, including material from Natasha Elkin. Her changed body bars an easy return to her Central life. After attacking Galina, Etta leaves Earth for Dustworld, where she joins Florimel and the Investigator in continued unregistered work. Galina recovers, holds imperator rank again, and resumes her personal relationship with McGill despite their damaged professional trust. Carlos still intends to leave Legion Varus, leaving a future command vacancy uncertain.