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Summary
When the Jungle Fights Back

The Colonial Scouts are an elite group of explorers who seek out habitable planets for the Colonial Expansion Board. They travel through space via programmable wormholes.

Trace, a new Scout, wants desperately to prove himself to both the Board and to his girlfriend. But when he leads a rescue party to a failing colony, everything goes against him.

His estranged father turns out to be the leader of the settlement. The colonists think he is inept because he is a teenager. And his disgruntled teammates think he was named team leader because of his dad. He can tell no one about his secret mission to save only fifteen of the seventy people.

Will he follow orders, leaving the rest of the colonists to die? Or will he find a way to save them all?

Character Sketch:
Trace Hanson is the only child of a wealthy and influential landowner. His mother, a biologist, was lighthearted and loving and kept his brusque, domineering father in line. When Trace was fourteen, his mother contracted Maramus Disease, a rare, disfiguring cancer. While his father toured the galaxy on a fund-raising mission, Trace struggled to care for his mother. Watching her die was devastating. Worse, when his father returned home, he never mentioned her. Instead, he began hosting gala events designed to find Trace a suitable spouse. At sixteen, Trace left home and found a job as an off-loader for a galactic shipping firm. While on leave on a distant world, he stumbled across a man assaulting a girl in an alley and stepped in to save her. The man turned out to be a local politician who, trying to salvage his political career, claimed Trace had robbed him. The girl settled out of court and wouldn’t corroborate Trace’s story. Trace was sent to a penal colony. But when the courts found out he was under age, they pulled him out of the colony and sent him to the Colonial Scouts.