When the colony carrier Caduceus is hijacked by pirates, it manages to fire off a single escape pod as a forlorn hope. Aboard that pod is Marissa Sokolov, an idealistic post-human woman, equipped with an advanced artificial intelligence named Shep. Together, they have a single goal, to find and retrieve the colony ship containing her friends and family. Unfortunately, arriving on Gagneux's World is possibly a worse fate than that which befell the Caduceus. If she has any hope of seeing her people again, she must first fight her way off-planet.

At the same time, the megacorp Infinitech, which funded the colony expedition in the first place, wants to make good on their investment. They hire a private investigator by the name of Tarin Henrikson, a ruthless cyborg more than a century old, who sees the world in black and white. He will stop at nothing to see his job completed, and woe to anyone who stands in his way. Fate will draw the two together as Marissa seeks to find her homestead among the stars.