In a fractured galaxy, fueled by insurgency, light-years away, planets vary: some are lush and fertile, nourished by the balance of nitrogen and oxygen in the air, thriving with creatures of various shapes and sizes. Others have distorted landscapes due to a concentration of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in their atmosphere, smothering beneath dense clouds of carbon dioxide ice scattering infrared radiation. A few with thick, methane-saturated air, sustain beings whose metabolism has evolved to feast on gases that would choke the lungs of Earth’s inhabitants. To top that off, not all of their inhabitants are peaceful.

In The Industrial Consortium, a protected zone, lies Vitrana, where the notorious, rogue smuggler known among mercenaries and insurgents as Infiltrator, the main antagonist of the story, breaks into a secure high-tech weapons factory. Cloaked in retractable metallic face armor, his identity is a mystery as he slinks through steel corridors. But despite his stealth, the factory’s defenses detect him --- a shrill alarm fills the air, echoing through the metallic structure. Guards scramble, their armored boots thundering as a Praloon bounty hunter named Lurai joins the hunt.

Infiltrator, cloaks himself in a shield of camouflage, blending into the shadows of a dark corridor. When a guard comes toward him, Infiltrator strikes swiftly, shoving a knife in the guard’s neck, sending him tumbling to the ground before running off to climb an escape hatch ladder to the roof exit, where he jumps to another building. His spaceship takes off in an hurry, a sleek silhouette against the brightly lit horizon.

On the volcanic world of Pralus, dissident droids fail in a covert mission to hijack weapons. The planet, alive with tremors and spewing geysers of ash, is home to gargantuan, reptilian and dragon-like creatures that stalk the skies. Meanwhile, Infiltrator’s spaceship is ambushed and damaged by a Vexari hired assassin --- which he blasts the vessel into space dust --- but is unable to travel to the rendezvous point near Draxis to seize the weapons on a spaceship departing the primitive planet. To replace him, his dissident android allies on Perennis Prime --- a space station hidden in orbit inside a cloud nebula that surrounds a cluster of blue stars --- transmit a message to the Arachtors, a renegade, warrior arachnid-like species with four spindly legs and glowing eyes.

A space-curious, Mayorfant female embarks on her first away mission. Unlike other members of her rare race, who keep to their serene, moonlit planet Sakros, she has always dreamed of the stars. She is a navigator, a pilot, and an explorer at heart. Aboard her sleek spacecraft, her only companion is a bipedal administrative droid which performs routine tasks and can interpret a myriad of alien languages.

But fate has other plans. She pilots her spaceship past the planet Draxis, where it’s mistaken for the weapons transport the Arachtors are hunting. The Arachtors board her vessel, triggering a firefight. Their skeletal forms, encased in glistening exoskeletons, move with precision. Blasts of alien energy illuminate the ship’s dark corridors as the Mayorfant fights for her life. During the clash, one of the Arachtors sends a transmission reporting the mix-up and their encounter with a "SpaceWoman." Moments before fleeing in an escape pod, the Mayorfant initiates a self-destruct sequence, obliterating both the intruders’ ship and her own vessel.

Reluctantly rescued by her people operating a refurbished, three-hundred-year-old spaceship, SpaceWoman returns to Sakros, where her tale of a shootout with aliens is greeted with indifference, but her exotic jewelry --- gifts from the gas-masked, olive-green scaly-skinned mine workers on the sun-baked colony of Agrossa --- captures the interest of her race as an important discovery. Inspired by the strange adornments, a factory is constructed for the sole purpose of replicating her necklace and bracelet and other metallurgical accessories, marking the beginning of a new cultural craze.

Ever so vengeful, Infiltrator has set his sights on this so-called SpaceWoman, a mysterious veiled figure with a black geometric star tattooed across her face from ear to ear, blaming her for the Arachtors’ failure. Shrouded in mystery, she is of average height with a white complexion, black fingernails, and wears black clothing including tall boots. While humanoid in the face, she has a thin neck. Around three hundred years ago an intergovernmental planetary alliance between the planets collapsed, and the Mayorfants gave up interstellar travel and cut off contact with other aliens in their galaxy. So, little is known of her homeworld Sakros nor the Mayorfant name of her race, other than that they resemble her in appearance; yet they differ in height and weight, all with black geometric shapes tattooed across their faces as well.

Sooner than expected, the "SpaceWoman" goes on her second mission into space to reconnect with the Hantavants, a cousin of her race. She is accompanied by an unbalanced maintenance droid and a younger female Mayorfant serving as her captain’s assistant. Infiltrator tracks her spaceship to Z’arva. But his plans are thwarted by Hantavant Port Security forces, which scan him for trespassing. After discovering his identity, Infiltrator is arrested and sent to the penal planet Talazar.

A giant blue world, 97% ocean and racked by powerful storms, escape from Talazar was death. Rising from a furious sea, the impregnable prison fortress, encased in towering steel and double stone walls, nests within retractable oblong steel frames, and looks like a large museum artifact. The surrounding ocean teemed with large-sized marine predators --- megalodons, manta rays, and electric eels. No inmate dare try to escape. Fear of instant death from an attack by a sea creature was too great.

Infiltrator’s ally and fellow smuggler Hobbs --- an alien with no skin pigment, revered for his photographic memory --- rescues him from the water world prison. The cloaked, lanky albino comes from a planet that has a highly concentrated electromagnetic energy field flowing around it. The space around the planet is subject to recurring electromagnetic ion storms, a space weather event characterized by the intense flow of ions and the presence of electromagnetic ion cyclotron waves. Mid-flight, on the viewscreen, Infiltrator sees a glowing bright blue star and no planets. Noticing a course deviation, not the coordinates he had set, Infiltrator suspects betrayal. In fact, Hobbs had made a deal with the bounty hunter Lurai to turn Infiltrator over to her. A struggle ensues and Hobbs is killed. In the chaos, the spaceship crash-lands on Eqello, a wasteland of a planet, home to a genetically plagued alien race prone to cannibalism. No one ever returned who landed there. Bounty hunter Lurai writes Infiltrator and Hobbs off for dead.

For months, Infiltrator is stranded on Eqello and forced to survive among these twitchy moving mutated aliens, mangled mockeries of life with teeth straight out of a nightmare. He scavenges the wreckage of many spaceships, living on whatever scraps he can find. Yet, despite the odds against him, Infiltrator manages to get a damaged Vexari freighter functioning smoothly. He escapes Eqello, only to run out of fuel in deep space, stranded and desperate. His distress beacon sends a pulse across the void.