A million people were about to die! The entire population of the planet Priamos was marked for death if one person on the surface could not be found in time. The staggering order was emotionless and inhuman - exactly like the Iduve, the strange aliens who handed down the decree. Perhaps the most advanced and least understood race in the known universe, the Iduve lived in giant spaceships that roamed in random patterns around the galaxy. For nearly two hundred years one of these mammoth vessels, the Ashanome, had been stalking an offender...one of their own kind who betrayed an ancient rite and fled into the sanctuary of "human" space.