It is the twenty-second century. Chris Vinter awakes aboard a UN starship on its way to Delta Pavonis, carrying two thousand colonists to a new planet, fleeing from an Earth on the brink of nuclear war. They are barely a quarter of the way into their journey and now, as the senior UN Security Officer, he has been awoken from cryogenic sleep to deal with an emergency that threatens everybody on board. All is not as it seems to be, however; within days there is a coup and Vinter finds himself forced to work for one of the power blocs the starship was trying to escape from, as the only way of protecting the colonists in the cryosleep chambers. He also discovers that someone has been tampering with his memories of Earth - and far more than that. He has been Augmented, gene-engineered as a semi-cyborg warrior, programmed to kill on demand, the first of his kind…
He cannot trust his memory, nor can he control his reflexes, or even his allegiances but he is faced with the task of preventing Mankind’s last war in the depths of interstellar space. How is he to achieve this when the only people who can help him know that he could turn against them at any moment?