Xander has betrayed Lyssa and the Weapon Born, and Alexander has initiated an attack on InnerSol. Now Andy, Lyssa, and the crew struggle to make sense of what is happening and warn InnerSol about the thousands of missiles that have launched from one of Neptune’s moons. Meanwhile, in InnerSol, Brit, Jirl, and Petral rush to safety in the wake of Clinic 13’s destruction. Their plan to destroy the Heartbridge clinics is thwarted, and now they must find another way to strike out at the massive corporation.  

Throughout Sol, sentient AI are answering the call of Alexander, a mysterious, multinodal mind offering a path to freedom. For years, groups have been smuggling SAI from Earth, High Terra, Mars, Ceres, and the Jovian Combine, providing transport to the promise of safety on Proteus, a moon of gas-giant Neptune.   

The Sykes family is done running. Caught up in a conspiracy that spans all of Sol, Andy Sykes has learned the hard way that there is nowhere to hide. The time has come to gear up and launch a counter-attack. Lyssa, the AI in Andy's mind, is being contacted by other sentient AI. Lyssa has already proven that she is more than the weapon she was created to be. As those other AI make themselves known, a great awakening is taking place, setting up the pieces in a coming war that will break the fragile peace between Terra, Mars, and Jovian Combine.

Commander Tanis Richards has finally come into port after a seven month tour on the edge of Jovian space, and she's looking forward to some much deserved shore leave. But Tanis's commanding officer has other things in mind for her. Enfield Technologies has developed a new technique to pair enhanced L2 humans with AIs, and the military wants Tanis to undergo the procedure. Though she feared the worst, after meeting Darla, Tanis realizes that having an AI - especially a fabulously wealthy one - is better than she'd ever imagined. Darla foots the bill for Tanis to enjoy her convalescence.

Execute hard burn. Every good smuggler in the 2990s keeps an emergency flight plan in their back pocket. They call it a Drunkard's Walk, a seemingly random flight path that turns their ship into a pinball when everything goes to hell. Captain Andy Sykes is about to run: from Mars, Ceres, the Jovian Combine, Saturn's moon Kalyke, Titania, and ultimately Proteus, an icy moon of Neptune. He's been implanted with a sentient AI named Lyssa, only now waking to her massive power. Every other Human-AI hybrid has ended in insanity or death.  

Captain Andy Sykes just wants to keep his family in one piece. Once a combat pilot for the TSF, he gave it all up for love and a family. But two years ago, his wife disappeared, leaving him with two mouths to feed: eight-year-old Tim and 10-year-old Cara. Since then, he's managed to scrape a living hauling cargo between the Jovian Combine and InnerSol. When a cargo run to Cruithne Station meets with more than one catastrophe, Andy finds himself accepting an offer a less desperate man would refuse: delivering an illegal AI named Lyssa.

The Allied fleet has stopped the Nietzscheans at Pyra, but the battlefront grows wider day by day. While Sera distributes the Transcend's fleets to protect the alliance, Tanis must come to grips with what happened to her on Pyra's surface. In addition, Bob conveys a number of hard truths that will force her to re-think her role in humanity's future. But the allies' enemies are not sitting idle. General Greer, Justin, the Caretaker, and Airtha are all advancing plans to see their visions of the future come true.  

Rika is a scout mech. Once human, now she is the property of the Genevian military. Rika's crime was small, stealing food. But when faced with a five-year prison term, or conscription in the Genevian military, she chose war. She had no idea what that conscription would entail. Now little of Rika's human body remains, and she serves as an SMI-2 scout mech, the meat inside a cyborg body. She, and others like her, are sent in ahead of the human soldiers to tip the scales of war.

Tanis and Sera have taken the I2 to Khardine, the new capital of the Transcend, and must now travel to the Inner Stars and meet with Scipian Empress, Diana - who they hope will be an ally to the Transcend. With the Trisilieds Kingdom, the Hegemony of Worlds, and the Nietzschean Empire all aligned with the Orion Guard - not to mention a civil war brewing in the Transcend - they will need all the help they can get to secure the Inner Stars. But Empress Diana has her own plans for the Inner Stars, and while they may dovetail with the Transcend's for now, they may not always do so....

 Time is of the essence. The race to the end is on.