Ambition is headed back to Earth after seven hundred years. She is beaten and battered, her surviving crew still reeling from the loss of their captain, and the deaths of thousands in a war no one wanted or understood. Along the way, they intercept the warship Retribution. Commander Alexander Edmund and his renegade crew are traveling in the opposite direction, towards the Hunn-ephei home world, on an unsanctioned mission none of them expect to survive.On Alderamin 4, Ly Sulafat and a handful of his people are prisoners of war at the very center of the threat. But Sulafat has even deeper problems. The ghosts of Ambition's past have caught up with its former captain, and one of them has started speaking to him.The long haul home is about to get longer, a whole lot deadlier, and the fate of humanity hangs on the actions of brave men and women now labelled as criminals.