In Artemis, the first city on the Moon, porter and part-time smuggler Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara is offered an opportunity by a regular client, wealthy businessman Trond Landvik, to assist him with a new business venture.
She visits the Apollo 11 landing site disguised as a tourist, leaving the HIB in place outside the airlock so that it can open the hatch for her without the assistance of a human EVA master.
The next day, while an electronic device created by her scientist friend Martin Svoboda makes it seem as though she is in her living quarters, Jazz treks across the Moon's surface to where the harvesters are collecting ore. She successfully sabotages one, but is spotted by the camera of another.
Jazz learns that Sanchez Aluminum is a front for O Palácio, Brazil's largest and most powerful organized crime syndicate, and that the killer, named Marcelo Alvarez, is now after her.
Jazz, anticipating Jin's deception, executes the trap she set, incapacitating Alvarez and then turning him over to the city's de facto police chief, Rudy.
Svoboda discovers that ZAFO is a virtually lossless cable ("Zero Attenuation Fiber Optic"), which will allow long-distance transmission of data without the need for repeaters, revolutionizing communications infrastructure.
Jazz then enlists her reluctant friends and father to stop O Palácio by destroying Sanchez's smelter, which will allow Trond's daughter Lene, who inherited his fortune, to seize the pertinent contracts and rebuild.
Dale helps Jazz break into the plant, where she sabotages the smelter to overheat and destroy itself, but in doing so unwittingly creates deadly chloroform that is pumped into the city's air supply.
After buying her father a new welding workshop to replace the one she accidentally destroyed as a teenager, Jazz is called to Ngugi's office, where the administrator informs her of her impending deportation.
Jazz tasks Kelvin, her smuggling partner on Earth, to discover which company Jin works for and invest in it before ZAFO and its earning potential is announced.