In the wake of the Asteroid Wars that tore across the solar system, Victor Zacharius makes his living running the ore-carrier Syracuse. With his wife and two children he plies the Asteroid Belt, hauling whatever cargo can be found. When the Syracuse stumbles into the middle of a military attack on the habitat Chrysalis, Victor
flees in a control pod to draw the attacker’s attention away from his
family. Now, as his wife and children plunge into the far deeps of
space, Victor has been rescued by the seductive Cheena Madagascar. He
must do her bidding if he’s to have a prayer of ever seeing his family
again.
Elverda Apacheta is the solar system’s greatest
sculptor. The cyborg Dorn was formerly Dorik Harbin, the ruthless
military commander responsible for the attack on Chrysalis.
Their lives and destinies have been linked by their joint discovery of
the alien artifact that had, earlier, profoundly affected industrialist
Martin Humphries. Similarly transformed by the artifact’s mysterious
powers, Apacheta and Dorn now prowl the Belt, determined to find the
bodies of the many victims of Harbin’s atrocities so that they can be
given proper burials.
Kao Yuan is the captain of Viking,
owned by Martin Humphries, who’s determined to kill Dorn and Elverda
because they know too much about the artifact and its power over him.
But Viking's second-in-command, Tamara Vishinsky, appears to have the real power on board ship. When Viking
catches up to Apacheta and Dorn, their confrontation begins a series of
events involving them, the Zacharius family, and Martin Humphries and
his son in the transformation of the human solar system.
