Caine Riordan has faced many crises in his unintended career as diplomat, soldier, and first contact specialist, but none more challenging than the one he faces now.

He and twelve of his crew are adrift in uncharted space, so far beyond Earth that the starfield is unrecognizable. And with the controls and computer destroyed, they have no way to calculate their position or call for rescue.

Instead, trapped on a derelict alien ship, they have only forty-eight hours before its decaying orbit causes it to burn up in the atmosphere of the strange planet beneath them. It's a silent and forbidding world of bleak deserts and turbulent seas, without any sign of life and dominated by violent storms.

But since the ship's lander is also useless, they've got only one way to reach the surface: flimsy, foam-inflating cargo drop pods never intended for human use, let alone an emergency planet-fall. And even if they live through the fiery plummet from low orbit, they have almost no portable gear with which to survive in an arid alien wilderness.

However, those who make it to the surface discover that the dangers they couldn't see from space are by far the most deadly. A variety of bizarre, carnivorous species roam the barren wastes, desperate for food. Their primary competition? Deeply devolved transgen humans that are as uncommunicative as they are primitive and ferocious.

Even more ominous, the world's blasted cities have telltale signs that indicate its original masters were none other than humanity's most dangerous foe: the Ktor.

And worst of all, they may still be here.