Contains spoilers for this episode and earlier episodes.
Spike, Jet and Faye return from separate captures expecting payment for catching participants in a series of gate robberies. The gate company refuses to pay without the organiser, and the prisoners can offer only the chess pieces distributed with their instructions. Ed finds a use for one of those pieces and starts an online game against Chessmaster Hex. Jet follows the corporate side of the case, planting a listening device during an unproductive meeting. The conversation he overhears gives the same name: Hex, a programmer who once worked on the gate network and disappeared after warning about defects in its design.
Ed's game provides a route to Hex's location, a collection of derelict spacecraft inhabited by people living outside ordinary society. Spike and Faye find a very old man who is much more interested in his chess opponent than their questions. Another hunter, Jonathan, arrives with a personal grievance against the person behind the robberies, but Hex no longer understands the revenge scheme he put in motion decades earlier. Its delayed instructions have outlived the anger that produced them. Jet explains the arrangement to the company and asks that Hex be left alone. The crew gives up another possible reward, while Ed continues the game that has connected her to a man everyone else approached as a criminal mastermind.