The alien ambassadors are learning English, EarthCent worries about humans going native. Over half of Earth's population has left the planet, mainly as contract workers for aliens, and the homeworld is losing relevance to the emigrants. The EarthCent president takes on the task of making sure that humanity isn't permanently stuck in a rut as low-skilled labor. Can the ambassador put aside her new-found obsession with the Galactic Free Press crossword puzzle and help save the day?

"Good SciFi comedy is as rare as hen's teeth. This was a fun read." Kelly Frank is EarthCent's top diplomat on Union Station, but her job description has always been a bit vague. The pay is horrible and she's in hock up to her ears for her furniture, which is likely to end up in a corridor because she's behind on rent for her room. Sometimes she has to wonder if the career she has put ahead of her personal life for fifteen years is worth it. When Kelly receives a gift subscription to the dating service that's rumored to be powered by the same benevolent artificial intelligence that runs the huge station, she decides to swallow her pride and give it a shot. But as her dates go from bad to worse, she can only hope that the supposedly omniscient AI is planning a happy ending.

You can't hold a book fair without physical books. The Stryx offer EarthCent help in reaching out to the wide-spread human communities, but as usual, it comes with a catch or two. Kelly see an opportunity to increase her book hoard, just as publishing on Union Station begins to take off and Donna's daughters enter a friendly competition. But who will publish the most expensive book of all?

Can humanity remain an independent species or are we ripe for a takeover? Kelly heads to Earth for the first ever Conference of EarthCent Ambassadors in Manhattan, but while the cat's away, the mice will play. The cat has its own problems, as some of the people remaining on Earth don't believe in aliens, unless they're the blue type that appear in romance novels.

Can humanity play a role in making stone soup? EarthCent bids to take over editorship of the All Species Cookbook, an exercise in galactic togetherness that has somehow gone off mission over the last couple million years. Samuel and Vivian struggle to find a balance between their co-op jobs for aliens and their personal lives. Dorothy seeks to revive the fortunes of her ballroom dancing fashions.

Running a galactic empire isn't easy, and one of the best emperors is calling it quits. On the other side of the galaxy, the Cayl Empire has decided to wind down operations and the Stryx are planning to pick up the pieces. Kelly is tapped to host an open house event on Union Station to tempt the aliens into joining up, but does anybody other than the Stryx actually want the merger to take place?

Humanity needs a galactic intelligence agency, but where to start? The story picks up less than a year after the events of High Priest on Union Station, with Kelly coming to the conclusion that EarthCent needs an intelligence service. Of course, EarthCent has no institutional knowledge of what spies do, or how they work, so the new agency gets off to a slow start. Then Kelly and the Union Station crew come up with a brilliant idea.