The galaxy has been at war for a generation, locked in a conflict that has swept myriad star systems and claimed lives beyond counting. It has been nineteen years since a covert HumanKrellian research venture aimed at fighting a pan-galactic plague was brought to its knees by an act of terrorism so profound that the Krellian moon was destroyed and Krell itself was forever shifted in its orbit. A ruined but powerful race, the Krellians swore revenge on the Maristilian Alliance of Planetary Systems, whose leaders, it was said, had engineered the attack on their homeworld. The massacre of Samuel Zentasen (Chairman of the MAPS Chancellor) and his entire family aboard their personal shuttle, the Eagle, thirteen years ago was but a drop in a vast sea of atrocities. And though the facts of the notorious "Bloody Eagle" were much reported, one fact remained hidden; the youngest Zentasen was not killed, but rescued. Now a grown young man, Wesley Zentasen finds himself drawn into the heart of the great conflict with a dark and terrible secret in his blood that could change everything.