Steven Montana, computer whiz and hacker extraordinaire, was in college when his world fell apart. A swarm of huge meteors fell all over the world, and on Steven's home town in California. In an instant, his family and all his friends were gone.

Later, working for a mysterious government agency, he was given a piece of unorthodox hardware to examine as a "test." He worked out its functions so well that he was called to Washington for a meeting, where they asked him countless questions, yet declined to answer his: but he would soon learn all the answers.

The "meteor" onslaught that had orphaned him had actually been a brief and still secret war between the U.S and its enemies (as told in Warp Speed) using a new warp drive technology that was more than top secret. Another secret was that U.S. had been sending faster-than-light ships to other star systems. Most secret of all was that unfriendly aliens were observing the Earth, and while U.S. spaceships were not quite in a war with the unknown aliens, they were shooting at the intruders.

Whether any of these answers would do Steven any good was an open question because he learned them only after those same aliens abducted and held him prisoner on one of their ships orbiting Saturn. And it looked like Steven and the Russian girl who was his fellow prisoner were about to become alien lab experiments...