Lieutenant Peter Cochrane of the Quantar Royal Navy has his future clearly mapped out. It begins with anassignment as an officer on Her Majesty's Spaceship Starbound, a Lightship bound for deep space voyages of exploration. But everything changes when Peter is summoned to the office of his father, Grand Admiral Nathan Cochrane, and given devastating news: the death of a loved one. In a distant solar system, an unprovoked attack on the Lightship Impulse resulted in the deaths of Peter's former girlfriend and many of her shipmates. The newly minted Lieutenant Commander is transferred to a USN...

For Peter Cochrane, serving as third officer on the Starbound and tasked with investigating a mysterious space station in a newly re-discovered system, the wounds of battle may have healed, but the battle is far from over.