There is a starship in trouble, lost in the void, with no one awake to hear the alarms. A thousand specially selected people left a troubled and unsustainable Earth for another world. Their dream was a new start on a virgin planet 30 years away. Their ship was state-of-the-art and entirely automatic, it's passengers safely sleeping through the journey - but something has gone wrong, something unexpected.

After an incident with a hot-air balloon causes college-dropout Sally Webber to lose her job, she sets off to find direction in her life. Crashing into a teleporting alien, however, is not on her to-do list. Now she’s on the run from TV-drama-loving aliens, and things are just getting started. 

The message from Carmen Vincent’s mother wasn’t possible. She died in the Mars base disaster two years ago. But when government agents show up at Carmen’s door, she realizes the message is no hoax. Someone is still trying to cover up the disaster and the reason why Earth abandoned its space program.

Michael Freeman is a disabled veteran who had just been fired from his mind-numbing cubicle job, which allowed his opportunistic girlfriend to dump him. Now, he only wants to spend some time at his grandfather's mountain cabin so he can unwind, away from the drudgery of daily life and with a cold beer in his hands. Standing in his way is an ancient spaceship with an emotional AI, nanites that have invaded his body, an international crime syndicate, a suicidal FBI agent on a vigilante mission, terrorists . . . and that's just the beginning.

Out of the blue, a young Space Fleet officer's dream becomes reality: He's made captain of a starship. Just in time for the return of humanity's most terrible enemy, after 50 years of peace. To survive against this enemy, Captain Tad Thatcher will have to do more than learn how to become an effective commander, or how to wrangle his wayward crew. He will need to reinvent space combat. From scratch.