The Andromeda visits the ocean planet Castalia, where Dylan Hunt has convinced his first planetary head of state to formally sign up to a re-founded Commonwealth. But there's a kind of a hitch: first Tyr Anasazi publicly accuses President Sebastian Lee of committing genocide against a Nietzschean minority, and then Lee is killed and Tyr wounded in a Locked Room Mystery.
Tropes:
- Better to Die than Be Killed: The Castalian version of the story is that the Nietzscheans in their system blew up their own Space Station in a mass suicide rather than surrender, and took ten thousand Castalian slaves with them.
- Debate and Switch: Did the Castalians destroy a Nietzschean habitat that was trying to surrender, or did the Nietzscheans commit mass suicide? We never find out, because the plot switches to investigating President Lee's murder at the end of act 2.
- Locked Room Mystery: Tyr shows up to apologize to President Lee for his accusation after Dylan convinces him to think of the greater good, and Lee asks to speak with him privately so everyone else leaves. We follow the other characters out for some chit-chat, then there's suddenly yelling and two shots are fired from a force lance. Everyone rushes back in, and Lee is dead of a shot through the heart and Tyr is unconscious.
- Mobile Fishbowl: The water-breathing Castalians get around on land via apparati that pump water across their gills from tanks worn on their backs. President Lee jokes to Hunt that if his compliments make his head swell up, he'll have to spend the rest of the visit in a bathtub because his breathing apparatus won't fit anymore.
- Request for Privacy: When Tyr goes to apologize to President Lee, Lee asks for everyone else to leave the room, clearly as a show of grace to Tyr's pride so he doesn't have to make his apology in public. Minutes later, screams and gunfire are heard in the room, and everyone rushes back in to find Lee shot dead and Tyr unconscious, kicking off a Locked Room Mystery.
- Varying Competency Alibi: After Tyr wakes up and is accused of Lee's murder, he dismisses Captain Hunt's reconstruction of the murder as "the most pathetic and ill-planned excuse for an assassination I've ever seen, and I speak as one who has had some ... slight experience in these matters." He insists that he would never have been caught and rattles off four different potential methods—two involving poison, one involving Vehicular Sabotage, another involving sabotaging Lee's breathing apparatus—before Hunt stops him and tells him he's convinced. A third party turns out to have hacked Tyr's force lance in order to frame him.
