Back Cover
Ensign Maya Davis has had her sights set on the captaincy of a starship since she launched her first toy rocket into Earth orbit at age four.
But not long after she departs the solar system aboard humankind's first interstellar vessel, New Horizons, sabotage cripples the ship, killing a third of the crew and
stranding the expedition light years from home under the siege of hostile forces.
Without knowing who she can trust, Maya must risk her life to get the crew home and prevent the genocide of the very exospecies Horizons set out to contact.
Synopsis
After four years of study, twenty-two year-old Maya Davis, graduate of the new Interstellar Expeditionary Force (IEF) academy, achieves her lifelong dream of exploring the stars.
She earns a commission aboard humanity's first deep space exploration vessel, New Horizons.
With the entire Solar System watching, and with a group of emigrants aboard, the starship launches into the unknown.
New Horizons has three mission objectives: make contact with a benevolent race of extraterrestrials discovered by SETI known as the Penphins;
locate a habitable, Earth-like exoplanet ripe for settlement;
and search for traces of the antagonistic alien race whose invasion mankind thwarted seventeen years earlier.
But when New Horizons exits hyperspace far beyond the sanctity of the solar system, sabotage cripples the ship, leaving only junior officers in command.
Maya must make a series of difficult choices in order to resolve the turmoil aboard, defend New Horizons from alien attack, and bring the stranded starship home.
Back in the solar system, forty-two year-old civilian flight instructor Brooke Davis, Maya's aunt and former UN Aerospace Defense pilot, receives a disturbing visit from a covert operative.
The visit prompts Brooke to head to the Martian south polar ocean, where she learns how the secret society known as The Vril manipulated the current political and social climate into being.
She also uncovers the society's nefarious agenda regarding New Horizons' voyage.
With time running out, Brooke races to save her niece light years away.