The Spin - an ancient artificial cluster of eighty-eight planets and twenty-one suns - is in decline.

For millennia, the people of Three Quarter Circle Harbour have watched the stars from their world, hidden in a forgotten corner of the Spin. Now something in the sky has changed and it will set them on a course to war and destruction.

Seldyan is one of the band of renegades that has broken out of the vast slave colony of the Hive. Hijacking one of the last of the Spin's great legacy warships, they wake its long-dormant intelligence and set a course that promises freedom.

But as the ancient ship's memory returns, with it comes a terrifying knowledge - a dire warning about the future that has been concealed for ten thousand years . . .