Interstellar Patrol II: The Federation of Humanity

Cover art by Jeff Easley.

Villains With Slick Tricks
Met Their Match in the Slicker
and Trickier Interstellar Patrol...

Vaughan Roberts and his two companions had been trapped on a crime-ridden, chaotic planet until they bamboozled the population with a gigantic hoax – which brought them to the attention of the Interstellar Patrol, who were looking for a few good con men, capable of ingenious improvisation and adept at playing dirty tricks on the bad guys. The new recruits acquitted themselves admirably, so they naturally were given more tough nuts to crack, including:

* Flummoxing an alien empire which has taken a number of human prisoners to gather information prior to an invasion. This has a personal aspect, since the prisoners are from the planet which Roberts tricked into reforming...

* Stopping a plan by not-so-good Samaritans who are pretending to cure a planetary plague – which they introduced to the planet – with a "miracle" drug which creates an addiction to the same drug, which the schemers will be glad to continue supplying for ever-increasing sums...

* Not only rescuing some Patrol personnel taken hostage by fanatics who plan to execute them one at a time until their leader is released, but also convincing other fanatics throughout the galaxy that the consequences of threatening anyone in the Patrol are too terrible even to think about...

* Making sure that the rightful heir to a planet's throne escapes from captivity and overthrows the usurper. This time there's a complication: Roberts may be falling for the heir's beautiful sister...

And much more, including such lethal alien wildlife as banjo birds with rapier-like beaks, alien caterpillars with flaming dragonlike exhalations, and a cast of thousands of biting, stinging, bloodsucking insects from a host of colony worlds who think humans are the tastiest things they've ever come across...

Editor's note: Interstellar Patrol II: The Federation of Humanity is a companion volume to Christopher Anvil's Interstellar Patrol (published by Baen Books in April, 2003). In this volume, the later adventures of the Interstellar Patrol agents Vaughan Roberts and his associates are recounted. Included also are all the various other stories which Anvil wrote in the same Federation of Humanity setting.