There are some things you just don’t expect to find in deep space. A 1947 Wisconsin license plate is one of them.

Rix Banner has finally made it back to Patience Station, where life is settling into something almost respectable. His mechanic shop is busy, Calypso needs repairs, his friends are launching businesses, and for once there might even be enough credits coming in to pay the bills.

Then a battered piece of chrome-plated junk turns up in a crate from halfway across the galaxy.

It’s from Wisconsin.

Rix’s Wisconsin.

Even stranger, the plate carries traces of Fantastium—the extraordinarily valuable material that makes interstellar travel possible. Earth is quarantined, technologically primitive, and absolutely nobody should be mining Fantastium there.

Apparently, somebody forgot to tell the aliens.

Before long, Rix, Kel, Amari, and one extremely enthusiastic stowaway are headed for northern Wisconsin to find out who has been sneaking around his hometown. What they uncover involves illegal mining, questionable bureaucracy, suspicious lights in the sky, and a scheme that could rob humanity of something it doesn’t even know it has.

Stopping it would be easier if Rix could solve the problem with a wrench.

Flying Saucers and Chrome Plate is humorous science fiction packed with battered spaceships, alien troublemakers, small-town Wisconsin, unlikely friendships, and one mechanic who has discovered that saving the world is a lot harder than fixing it.