Politics is dirty. Piracy is just a little smudged.

Grif Vindh, captain of the Fool's Errand, is a little out of his way. Doing a favor for a friend, he finds himself in a little-known backwater system where two ships are locked in a desperate fight. Sensing opportunity, Grif resolves to intervene, hoping one or both ships will make decent salvage.

That's how it all starts. It goes downhill from there.

A Rake by Starlight is the long-awaited sequel to Pay Me, Bug! Space Opera sung a little off key...

Grif and his crew sift through the wreckage of a destroyed transport ship looking for something good. What they find is roughly the opposite of that.

Why were two Tylaris Barony ships trying to destroy each other on the very fringes of known space? What was one of them trying so desperately to protect? In this episode, Grif and his crew learn the answer to those questions. It is generally agreed, in hindsight, that this was a mistake.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy. In this case, the enemy shows up early and the plan sort of shrugs and rolls over.

Grif and his crew appear to have survived their ordeal. While they wait for the universe to change its mind, they try to make the best of their situation by trying to lob off their new acquisition on someone who knows what to do with it.

Grif and his crew just made the deal of a lifetime - potentially. But sometimes success attracts attention, and they've had a lot of success in the last year. Someone is about to make Grif an offer he can't refuse.

Everything was going relatively well until the corpse showed up alive. Things unraveled quickly after that.

A man drives along a lonely stretch of Virginia road, lost in the endless monotony of a yellow double-line separating his past and future. Somewhere on that road he pulls over to the side, gets out of his car, and walks through a grove of trees to find himself… somewhere else.

• 0:41 Prologue
• 6:34 Chapter One - The Land Beyond the Trees
• 25:00 Chapter Two - The Dance
• 41:42 Chapter Three - The Picnic and the Garden