Federation Marshals Geos Ah'rion Rassas rel Pen'atha (known as Orion) and his partner Danni Jahleel have been diverted by an emergency hyperspace relay message from delivering a prisoner to the Federation Justice Center on Midway. While their prisoner is sent on ahead, Orion and Danni find themselves faced with investigating the murder of a weirwan scientist on a Federation science outpost. A murder almost certainly committed by a terrachian perpetrator.
The imagined future of this story takes place 280 years from our own. This puts it just a few years after the formation of a Federation largely run by humans (terrachians) and another spacefaring race called the tir'a. These two races formed the Orion Federation, named after the Orion Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy where both the terrachian and tir'a spheres of influence exist. After years of war, it was a way to peacefully link their cultures. Many atrocities were committed on both sides and many innocents were killed or captured and interned during that lost decade.