Star Hunter

Vye Lansor is mopping up after a knife fight in the Starfall, the lowest dive on Nahuatl, when a stranger buys him a drink and offers him a future. Vye doesn't know the cup is drugged, or that the stranger, Ras Hume, is a crippled star pilot with a grudge who has just made a deal with Milfors Wass, the cleverest criminal mind in five systems.

The plan is to condition Vye into believing he is Rynch Brodie, the missing heir to a third of a shipping empire, and leave him beside a wrecked lifeboat on the frontier world of Jumala for a safari party to discover. But Jumala was supposed to be empty, and something in its forests and rivers knows exactly what it is doing.