The last thing Steven remembers was waiting in a prison cell for the results of an appeals trial. His crime: speaking out against unfair treatment of workers. His opinion of his sentence: it’s political.

Next thing he wakes up on a commercial ship run by the Merlin Company, where he meets Luciane, Rollo and Jack, fellow prisoners of an inconveniently political nature, and the four will be sent down to a planet where a research team has vanished.

Everything needed to survive and return is on the abandoned base, and all the company wants is to know what happened to twelve scientists.

Except the company is lying. They know what happened to the scientists. They’re testing something, and the four are guineapigs. They’re not supposed to come back. The space craft to return is not even at the base anymore.

But one discovery will change everything.

Steven, Jack, Rollo, Luciane, Nina and the gelatinous alien Gork travel to a gathering and exposition of space service providers. While Steven the biologist is going to give a talk about alien life, their presence at the gathering aims to secure a paid contract that might bring them closer to returning to Earth.

Because they have escaped from a sector of space controlled by the secretive Merlin Company, dark forces are interested in the team, and especially in Gork, their alien companion.

The military has found an anomaly in space that could hold secrets to past civilisations, but an agent they’ve sent to investigate has disappeared. They want to hire the team to rescue him.

But of course, rescuing Hayden Huong is merely a front for their real intentions, because if they had wanted to rescue a single man, they could easily have done it themselves.

A tale of conspiracies, alien life and dark human intentions.