When Starwort Bacchus finds herself running from her landlord, skipping out on the rent, she jumps aboard an automatic repair vessel and hitches a ride to the next port. But the search for her father's legacy, the inheritance her uncle nearly decimated, takes her to planets where friends and enemies are hard to identify, and her best ally is a computer. With a pocket full of "Universals" and a ceramic blade strapped to her thigh, she travels the darkness looking for a home. Instead she finds a growing list of places she cannot go to again, including a place she has never been - Earth.

Starwort continues her search for her father's legacy, carefully avoiding an ever increasing Central Government presence, an epidemic virus spreading from planet to planet and the ever-present threat of those who seek to steal the legacy. To her and her crew, the promised haven of the planet her father left for her seems a dream they will never realize.

A girl is thrust into a galaxy-wide search for her father's legacy, finding only questions. The man with the answers is an old friend named Galium, except that he is the most wanted man in the universe and he is missing. Starwort Bacchus and her crew must find him before the Central Government finds them and before the unknown forces they keep running into overwhelm them.

When Starwort Bacchus seeks the key to her father's legacy, a planet to make into a home, she must first go to a home she left behind, Khons, and one she has never known: Earth. She is followed by pirates and by officials of the Central Government. The sky and her little vessel are both getting very crowded.