From inside a giant asteroid, hundreds of light years from Earth, Admiral Jenetta Carver^® is beginning to look forward to a trip home, and finally receiving command of her own ship. Her five year tour of duty as the Base Commander of the Stewart SC Base is nearing an end, and the ship carrying her replacement has been underway for more than a year.

But when the GSC destroyer carrying Admiral Vroman is attacked just a few light years from the base, her plans are quickly forgotten. Rescue ships arriving at the site the next day find that only corpses remain aboard the Lisbon, while a severely damaged freighter with a dead Tsgardi crew floats nearby. There's no sign of the  admiral, and most of the crew is unaccounted for.

Obviously, the freighter was a party to the attack, and replaying the Lisbon's video logs clearly show the other ships involved in the ambush. The fact that those other ships were all of Milori design, suggests that the Milori and the Raiders have now combined forces to bring down the Galactic Alliance.

The Milori, unsuccessful in their first attempt to defeat the Galactic Alliance and annex it's territory, prepare for a second assault. Emperor Maxxiloth has decided he won't be embarrassed a second time and sends every ship available in his empire as part of the new invasion force.

When a ship carrying the admiral assigned to replace Captain Jenetta Carver^® as commander of the GA's most forward base is attacked, and the surviving crew  kidnapped, all forces in the sector are immediately put are on alert. A search for the missing crew and their attackers begins in earnest, but with thousands of square light-years of space to cover around Stewart Space Command Base, the task is a daunting one, and some might say impossible. When Jenetta learns of the new plot by the Milori to conquer the Galactic Alliance, locating and rescuing the crew of the Lisbon must receive a lower priority.

Months later, a shuttle touches down on a primeval world far inside the Frontier Zone, where Admiral Vroman and the senior officers from the GSC destroyer Lisbon are to be marooned by their Milori captors. As the rest of the crew is being shuttled down to the surface, the officers quickly draw up a plan of survival. Left with only the most basic of supplies and equipment, the spaceship crew must learn how to exist in a hostile, planetary environment.

While the forces at Stewart are preparing for an imminent attack by the Milori, the crew of the Lisbon are learning that they have some rather large and particularly nasty neighbors with voracious appetites and predacious habits.